🚀 go-pugleaf

robinson@geriatrix.cs.uoregon.edu (Bill Robinson) writes:


>Please point me to references concerning group meeting time scheduling (both
>commercial products and research projects). Preferrably, these systems will
>take schedules from participants as input and derive times in which a meeting
>could take place. (Extensions may include tracking of meetings.)

>Thanks,

>Bill Robinson
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>Department of Computer Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1202
>domain: robinson@cs.uoregon.edu
>usenet:{decvax, allegra}!tektronix!uoregon!robinson
>Phone: (503) 686-4408		Fax:   (503) 686-3127
>-- 
>Bill Robinson
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>Department of Computer Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1202
>domain: robinson@cs.uoregon.edu

The commercial product history in this area is extensive and goes back almost
a decade.  However, it is extremely difficult to find anyone who uses this
feature, due to the fact that even where electronic calendars are in use, they
tend to be used by a small subset of the population.  Data on such use appear
in a CHI'87 paper by Susan F. Ehrlich and analysis in a TOOIS paper the same
year.  This work and its implications are reviewed in papers I presented at
CSCW'88 and in Office: Technology & People in 1989, and is briefly reviewed
in a chapter "Groupware and Cooperative Work: Problems and Prospects" in the
book The Art of Human-Computer Interaction, edited by Brenda Laurel (Addison-
Wesley, 1990).  Two recent papers describing technical approaches to building
such systems are M. Woitass, Coordination of Intelligent Office Agents --
Applied to Meeting Scheduling, from the IFIP WG 8.4 Crete Conference,
published as a book Multi-User Interfaces and Applications, edited by S. Gibbs
and A.A. Verrijn-Suart, North-Holland, 1990; D. Beard et al., A Visual
Calendar for Scheduling Group Meetings, in Proc. CSCW'90.  From those you can
find some other references.  I strongly encourage you to consider the adoption
problems and perhaps do some research into the reception and use of the
commercial products, which have long been sold by IBM, Wang Labs, Digital,
and others, before undertaking the building of new prototypes.  Beard et al
reported at CSCW90 that perhaps when everyone is carrying notebook computers
it will be possible to get more widespread use of electronic calendars; in the
meantime, most of us prefer paper calendars for their convenience.

Jonathan Grudin
Computer Science Department   Aarhus University
Ny Munkegade 116   Building 540
DK-8000 Aarhus C    Denmark

jgrudin@daimi.aau.dk   or   grudin.chi@xerox.com