[chandler-users] Intelligent Event Scheduling

[Alan Mandel]

Jeffrey Harris wrote:
> ...
> Chandler is very explicitly targeting small workgroups, which we think
> are poorly served by existing software.  Right now, our features are
> clustered around groups with strong trust relationships.  Thus, a lot of
> our workflows are based on an assumption that transparency and back and
> forth are useful and welcome.
>
> So, on to features.  Our design for scheduling in our yet to be shipped
> "Preview release" works by just letting users overlay different peoples
> full calendars.  We implemented rudimentary free/busy UI using the
> emerging CalDAV standard's freebusy support, which would allow users to
> publish just their availability without exposing more details about events.
>
> We've actually pulled freebusy support out for Preview because we have
> limited time for feature polish and we realized for our target small
> workgroups, freebusy didn't add a lot of value compared to sharing full
> schedules.
> ...
> The two challenges I see of relying on people to provide more detail
> about where they sit on the spectrum between completely unavailable and
> available are that:
> A) sometimes people get overwhelmed with choices and don't want (or know
> how to) add more semantic detail, and
> B) There's multi-dimensional social nuance to scheduling.  Some
> organizations can live with forcing scheduling conversation into
> pre-defined buckets, others will find this stifling.
>
> That's not to say we shouldn't offer more semantic options, just that
> choosing what default options should exist isn't an open-and-shut issue.
>   
> ...
>
> Like most calendar software, we've got a Tentative status for events,
> rendered slightly different from confirmed events.  But I'll confess
> I've never seen anyone use this status, so while I like the concept I
> think Tentative has so many attendant social factors and it encompasses
> such a broad swath of the availability spectrum that it's not actually
> very useful.
>
> Our approach to complex state like this is to encourage people to have
> conversations about events.  Unfortunately I think the UI feature that
> would make such conversations glue together tightly aren't going to be
> implemented for Preview (you might occasionally see reference to
> "clusters" on our lists and on the wiki, we're not doing clusters for
> Preview).  But we're expecting users will do a combination of emailing
> chatty threads about events, and updating the notes field in place
I really appreciate the response, though I'm not sure what this means 
about the prospects of such a feature showing up in, say, Chandler 1.0.  
A few comments:

* It's much easier to choose an "event bumpability" setting from a 
drop-down list (which could be optional and/or tailored to the needs of 
the organization) than to remember to add explanatory comments or start 
a little conversation about every event describing how other people 
should treat the event.
* Even in small workgroups there are "private" meetings for which 
details should not be shown.  I understand the tradeoff for Preview.
* "Tentative" might be a useful category, but it's not quite what I'm 
after.  It seems to imply that the event may not happen.  What's more 
useful is knowing that the person doesn't need to attend the event.
* Even small workgroups can find it very difficult to schedule 
meetings.  I've had a hard time scheduling meetings with as few as 3 
people (total), and I end up grilling each participant about the status 
of each of their listed events for the next few days. "Which of the 
meetings you have scheduled are ones that you could punt?" Unless by 
"small" you mean that you assume that every member of the workgroup 
knows the background of every internal and external event every member 
schedules.  Which would be a very, very limiting assumption.

I'm curious as to whether this sort of feature has come up for 
discussion before.  If something like this could be bolted on later, 
that would certainly satisfy my needs.  But I'm just surprised if 
Chandler hasn't considered building in this capability, which to me 
seems extraordinarily valuable, even for a fairly small team.

I've been following Chandler since its existence first became public, 
and I just finished reading Dreaming in Code, and so was reticent to 
even mention any additional features.  But I couldn't stop myself. :-)

-Alan
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