Presence and IntComm WG

[Neal McBurnett <>]

After reading an interview about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
initiative, at http://lwn.net/Articles/188073/

I looked at the "sugar" environment and came to a posting by
Christopher Blizzard about how presence will be part of the
basic environment of the machines, rather than a separate application:

 http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=211

 ...

 This image describes what we're thinking about presence. I talked
 briefly about this in a previous posting but this is the first time
 that we've really taken a step to make it part of the
 environment. In today's desktops, "chat" is a program. It stands
 alone. You can talk to your friends, you can paste text, you can even
 video conference, but as a program it is completely separated from
 the rest of the programs that you use on a day to day basis. In fact,
 if you go and download one of our daily images, chat is still trapped
 in a tab of its own.

 Once of our stated goals is to create a social environment for the
 kids. So what we're trying to do is to turn the idea of presence and
 who is around into a basic element of the environment. Other programs
 that are also being used in the environment can assume that there's
 a method to find other people and what they can do. We hope that this
 will create an entire application environment that encourages
 collaboration and sharing.

 So at an implementation level, what we're going to do is make the
 presence pane something that's always around. To save screen real
 estate it will probably slide in and out from the side of the screen,
 but if you want to choose how to share a document with a friend or
 send a message to someone that slide pane will pop up and let you
 pick which one of your friends you want to send it to.

Think of the use-cases when these kids get to college....

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/
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