[Design] From, To and most of all CC

[Joel Finkle]

I've been a prairie dog on this list for a long time now (ever since I got full-time employment again), just poking my head up every once in a while, and only reading the occasional note, so I hope that this isn't a repetition.

Mimi Yin's note this morning about From and To, and their meanings, sparked a couple of brain cells together for me regarding CC -- originally, this was "Carbon Copy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy) when sheets of carbon paper were actually forced through the platens with additional sheets of paper, and while it should have migrated in meaning to "Courtesy Copy", I think most people still have a deep structure map to the words "carbon copy" even if they've never seen carbon paper in their lives. 

In e-mail and calendaring, the "cc" field is used for a number of purposes, seldom used well.
Things I'd like to do well with courtesy copies:
  a.. Items received when I'm on the CC list should be clearly marked that I am not a primary recipient, to make it clear that I probably don't need to reply
  b.. It would be nice in some cases to send a courtesy copy without dumping 10MB of attachments on someone who really only needs to know that the message was indeed sent (perhaps a 'receipt copy'?)
  c.. Calendaring should permit courtesy copies sent to users who are expected not to show up -- again, notification is the critical factor here, and it shouldn't clutter up their calendar with nonsense meeting requests.
And if we're voting, I'll go in favor of renaming From and To depending on context. Especially in the case of calendaring where an administrative assistant does the scheduling, it can be 
"From" ker, with the "Organizer" ker boss.  Pardon the gender-nonspecific pronouns.  I'm not normally prone to them.

What about task assignment and workflow?  If Pat assigns a task to Terry, who delegates it to Casey... who is it "From" and who is it "To"?  When Casey finishes the assignment and sends it to Taylor for review... who is the task "From"?

Joel Finkle, PMP
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