Presence and IntComm WG

[Jeremy George <>]

  I missed this.  What an absolutely spectacular social tussle.  The three
people I'm meeting with vote down my wife's call to me, and I get to
explain later that evening why her call was refused!

  Or, instead of having to stand up in front of a room and beg folks
to shut off their cell phones maybe the particpants could, in effect,
require that cell phones not receive non-emergency calls?

  In a skiff or skiff-like environment the notion certainly seems at
least theoretically possible.  What would a 'silent survey' look like?
You wouldn't want to poll everyone for a response?  Maybe that could
just be a part of a user's profile?  No non-emergency calls in
meetings.

- Jeremy


On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, Ben Teitelbaum wrote:

> Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 11:48:02 -0500
> From: Ben Teitelbaum 
> <>
> Reply-To: 
>
> To: wg-pic 
> <>
> Subject: [wg-pic] Consensual Interruptions
>
> 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/