I was recently looking over the Hula Project, the new calendaring and mail server that Novell recently open sourced.
I was struck by the idea that they wanted to fundamentally rethink what people used a calendaring system for. For example, here’s a whiteboard shot laying out some if the different ideas they’ve been working on.
But these ideas got me thinking. It looked to me as if they were starting with ideas steeped in current technology. That is, I felt they were limiting themselves by beginning with ideas from the current technology — not looking at fundamentally how people could use calendaring technology. This seemed like a limiting approach to me.
I got thinking that if instead of beginning with ideas like ‘notifications’ and ‘aggregation’ they began with common ‘human interactions’, then that may lead to some interesting places.
Here are a couple ideas that look at ‘calendaring’ as “Coordinating meetings and tasks among different spheres of people”.
Common human interactions that are facilitated by calendaring might be:
- Meetings with co-workers
- Meetings with people in other companies
- Social events
- Family activities
- Etc.
In general, I believe this can be generalized as ‘coordinating events and tasks with people in different spheres’. We all have different spheres of people we interact with. My spheres might be:
- Work
- Family
- Friends (different circles/spheres of friends)
- Various professional ’spheres’ of people.
And calendaring facilitates each of these spheres of people by coordinating both 1) meetings, and 2) common, coordinated task scheduling.
One spin on this is that each of these ’spheres’ of people may use different calendaring systems to interact with each other. I may use outlook or evolution at work, but among friends I may use an e-mail list. A central question is essentially, “How do I integrate the common events and tasks/activities of different spheres of people to give users a way to manage them all easily and make the interactions fun and useful?”
Some ideas that make this even more interesting are:
Varied Clients/Media for facilitating interactions.
- Different people will use different clients or prefer different media for interaction. For example, many will use an e-mail client, but others may want to use a browser or a cell phone.
- Using a cell phone as your way to interact with your ’spheres of people’ makes it possible to use audio/voice rather than text/images for interaction. (For example, ORBITZ calls my cell phone with audio-based flight updates based on my flight schedule.)
- Using a cell phone with a camera and rich display as your way to interact with your ’spheres of people’ makes it possible to use pictures/images rather than text/images for interaction.
Archiving/historical records of interactions (i.e., the “memory” of the interaction)
People that meet with each other create ‘memories’ of each interaction that can take various forms. These forms may be:
- Blog entries regarding the event
- Pictures of the event
- Recordings or voice annotations of the event
- New tasks or other meetings that follow from the event.
These ‘memories’ are of value to the spheres of people involved in the event and are likely generated by them. This is the same whether the event is a birthday party for my son or a customer meeting. I’d posit that these various memories should be part of (or at least facilitated by) the calendaring system.
One example might be generating a ‘tag’ for Flickr where images associated with the event can be accessed. The calendaring system (using the Flickr API) should create the tag and provide users of the calendaring system a way to locate images of the event. (Again, this is just one example.)
Given all the latest technologies (like RSS, digital photography, audio/pod casting, super cell phones, etc) it’s almost as if every application we commonly use should be rethought with an eye toward leveraging all the infrastructure that’s being put into place.
What are your ideas?
How can calendating systems leverage new and emerging technologies?
