Presence and IntComm WG

[Deke Kassabian <>]

--On Thursday, June 9, 2005 6:53 PM -0400 Steve Blair 
<> wrote:

> Hello:
>
>  I thought I'd take a minute to summarize what I was describing on
> today's call in case other attendees had trouble hearing me. Please
> add any comments, suggestions or corrections.
>
>  I believe we are a point where we need to show support for
> the PIC-SER deployments while also letting Campus Trial participants
> and I2 meeting attendees know that we have a plan for where the
> PIC work is heading.

We have a plan? :)

>  I like the idea of a demo deployed in a demo room as one way to
> achieve this goal.

Sounds good.  Do we know if the demo room is large enough to make
this sort of thing practical, and if our intended use could avoid
being very disruptive for other demos?

>  The demo I envision would show a multi-site deployment of PIC-SER,
> at most three servers, where each server would host a single SIP
> domain. Probably soft clients, but not necessarily only soft clients,
> would register to one server /domain.
>
>  Clients would be able to call each other with something like the
> previously
> demo'd weather report showing the likelihood the call would succeed.
> The weather report would have to be updated regularly to be useful.

This does sound good.  What are you imagining for the weather report?
Try this on for size:  A network management system provides utilization
data.  An app on the laptop asks the net mgmt system for that data and
also measures wireless signal strength and uses the two to make a 
coarse
guess at the chances for success.  That the kind of thing you are 
thinking
of?  Little sun and cloud icons in a small browser window? :)

>   Clients would also be able to place off-net calls to at least the
> local calling areas. Perhaps to locations in North  America. For 
this we
> would need PSTN connectivity and most likely session timers to 
timeout
> calls so the call doesn't end up costing too much.
>
>    For PSTN access I'm thinking PAETEC might offer some level of
> connectivity as an I2 corporate member and all around interested
> party.
> Perhaps Cisco can pony up a small gateway like a 26x0 series box.
> Anyone lurking who might offer resources :-)

We can ask about these things.  We'd want to start asking as soon as
possible!

>    I think I'd like to see the previously demo'd manual location
> service as well as the automatic location service deploy to show the
> location of clients.  The manual service could be available at a 
workstation
> for people to change a clients location and see the change on a 
display.
>     The location would be displayed on one or two large plasma
> displays (Deke can we use our displays??)

Depends on if they are otherwise spoken for during this time, and
if we think they can be transported safely to and fro.

> and change in realtime with different
> quadrants of the demo hall (and perhaps just outside the hall) being
> served by skiffs.

Back to my earlier question...  If the demo room isn't sufficiently
large, and/or the signal strength data at the skiff is not sufficiently
fine-grained, we may have trouble fixing the location of the user. 
Right?

>    Now here's the kind of silly part.
>
>    What if each quadrant represents either our Moon or one of the
> moons around Jupiter. The display would have a background image of
> our Solar System with "dots" representing clients superimposed on the
> image of the moon where they currently reside.
>
>    These could change as location changed. Perhaps we can get really
> weird and offer presence states such as "in crater", "low on oxygen",
> "heading to Jupiter", etc.
>
>    Ok so this is a little corny but you get the idea.

Cute and corny.  But if the domains we use were to represent, say, a
west coast university, an east coast, and a texas university, we could
superimpose location on a map of the US and make it sorta real for
the people there.  Any value in that?

Thanks for writing this up, Steve.  I think the idea holds some real
promise.

Others?

^Deke

-------
Deke Kassabian,  Senior Technology Director
Information Systems and Computing, University of Pennsylvania