🚀 go-pugleaf

Last summer I advised an undergraduate designing a campus electronic 
calender. Individuals and groups within the university each had their own 
calender. Groups used the calender to announce events. These events are 
public and are rarely rescheduled. Individuals would subscribe to a 
group's calender. Should one's set of subscriptions generate a conflict, 
the conflict was resolved automatically via a user-interest weight or 
manually. Conflict resolution, here, is, simply, which even do I attend.

What became clear while designing this calender was that an individual has 
little control over their calender. Within the university and my 
organization events can be categorized as either classroom, projects, 
consulting, or entertainment. Students are, for the most part, required to 
attend classes, and I am required to attend project meetings. 
Entertainment is also quite inflexible (movies, plays, etc.). The only 
flexibility I seemed to have was with consulting. However, even here, what 
little time I have left in the day often "automatically" fixed consulting 
events.

The ideas of subscribing to calenders, conflict resolution through an 
interest weight, and general inflexibility of one's own schedule might be 
considered further.

-- Andrew Gilmartin
   Computing & Information Services
   Brown University
   andrew@brownvm.brown.edu