andrew@brownvm.brown.edu (Andrew Gilmartin) (07/21/90)
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