Presence and IntComm WG

[Ben Teitelbaum <>]

To complement Jeremy's posting, here's another nugget from the New
York Times.  

The NYT Magazine's annual "Year in Ideas" this week describes work
from MIT that solves the problem of unwanted interruptions of physical
meetings in a creative way using geo-location and real-time polling.
Basically, the people physically proximate to the called party are
polled quickly as to whether the call should go through.  

That the handling of a two-party call might be influenced by the
presence of others in the vicinity of the call is not an idea I've
considered before.  We've talked about room presence (e.g. there is a
class taking place in this room now), but not the notion that the room
presence would be determined dynamically by the surrounding people.

Still many technical and social details to flesh out (and I really do
not know about the blinking squirrel!), but it's an interesting
notion...

    The problem is all too familiar: You're chatting with a group of
    people when someone's cellphone goes off, interrupting the
    conversation. What makes the intrusion irritating isn't so much
    the call itself - the caller has no way of knowing if he has
    chosen a good time to cut in. It's that the group as a whole
    doesn't have any say in the matter. Until now.

    Stefan Marti, a graduate of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, who now
    works for Samsung, has devised a system that silently surveys the
    members of the group about whether accepting an incoming phone
    call would be appropriate. Then it permits the call to go through
    only if the group agrees unanimously - thus creating a more
    consensual sort of interruption.

    more here: 
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-10.html

-- ben

-- 
Ben Teitelbaum   http://people.internet2.edu/~ben/