Presence and IntComm WG

[Candace Holman <>]

Looks like someone is finally making the leap to incorporate presence as 
a part of the social fabric rather than isolating it to collaborative 
workspaces.  I like how the one-laptop-per-child project is taking this 
kind of risk in their design because they don't have to worry about 
pleasing everyone at once.  If they end up pleasing more than these 
lucky children, which it looks like they can do, kudos!

Thanks for the links, Neal.

Candace

Neal McBurnett wrote:
> 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/
> Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60
>