Designing and deploying groupware is difficult. Groupware evaluation and design are often approached from a single perspective, with a technologically-, individually-, or socially-centered focus. A study of Groupware Calendar Systems (GCSs) highlights the need for a synthesis of these multiple perspectives to fully understand the adoption challenges these systems face. First, GCSs often replace existing calendar artifacts, which can impact users' calendaring habits and in turn influence technology adoption decisions. Second, electronic calendars have the potential to easily share contextualized information publicly over the computer network, creating opportunities for peer judgment about time allocation and raising concerns about privacy regulation. However, this situation may also support coordination by allowing others to make useful inferences about one's schedule. Third, the technology and the social environment are in a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship: the use context is affected by the constraints andaffordances of the technology, and the technology also co-adapts to the environment in important ways. Finally, GCSs, despite being below the horizon of everyday notice, can affect the nature of temporal coordination beyond the expected meeting scheduling practice.

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in ove...

We view meeting scheduling as a distributed task where each agent knows its user's preferences and calendar availability in order to act on behalf of its user. Although we may have some intuitions about how some parameters could affect the meeting scheduling efficiency and meeting quality, we run several experiments in order to explore the tradeoffs between different parameters. Our experiments show how the calendar and preference privacy affect the efficiency and the meeting joint quality under different experimental scenarios. The results show how the meeting scheduling performance is more stable and constant when agents try to keep their calendar and preference information private. We believe that these parameters play a key role in the distributed meeting scheduling task, specially if we are interested in building distributed systems with truly autonomous and independent agents where there is not a fixed control agent. Introduction In our daily life, meeting scheduling is a natura...

Our research agenda focuses on building software agents that can facilitate and streamline group problem solving in organizations. We are particularly interested in developing intelligent agents that can partially automate routine information processing tasks by representing and reasoning with the preferences and biases of associated users. The distributed meeting scheduler is a collection of agents, responsible for scheduling meetings for their respective users. Users have preferences on when they like to meet, e.g. time of day, day of week, status of other invitees, topic of the meeting, etc. The agent must balance such concerns, proposing and accepting meeting times that satisfy as many of these criteria as possible. For example, a user might prefer not to meet at lunchtime unless the president of the company is hosting the meeting. We apply techniques from voting theory to arrive at consensus choices for meeting times while balancing different preferences. 1 Introduction Routine...

Abstract. This paper contributes to the design of Groupware Calendar Systems (GCSs) for use in domestic life. We consider a number of ethnographic studies of calendar use in domestic circumstances to illuminate the design space and inform design reasoning. GCSs have been employed in the workplace for sometime and have been informed by studies of ‘calendar work’. As design moves out of the workplace and into the home, the unique demands of domestic use now need to be considered. Existing insights into calendar work are restricted to the workplace however, and are constrained by analytic taxonomies. In the absence of first-hand knowledge of calendar use in domestic settings, we suspend the use of taxonomies and describe the ‘interpretive work ’ implicated in calendar work in order to explicate real world practices of calendar use in domestic life. These novel studies draw attention to a corpus of accountable work-practices that impact directly on design. In particular, they emphasize the need for design to consider how the physical and the digital may be merged to support collaboration ‘anywhere, anytime’; the necessity of devising negotiation protocols supporting computer-mediated communication; and the development of collaborative access models and interaction techniques to support data sharing.

A central thesis in our research has been the claim that a number of routine information processing needs in organizations can be efficiently automated. As such, we are interested in designing and implementing software systems that automate and share information processing tasks of associated human users. The benefit of such software is two-fold: they allow users to concentrate on more productive tasks, and they improve the quality of information processing by preventing errors that might be introduced by human users due to the routine and tedious nature of the job in question. In particular, we have studied the problem of efficiently automating the process of scheduling meetings between employees in an organization. Our approach to meeting scheduling, in contrast to most of the currently available software for centralized calendar management and meeting scheduling, is a distributed one, where each employee in the organization is provided with an automated (comput...

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www.cs.umd.edu/hcil We describe the design and use of a system facilitating the sharing of calendar information between remotely located, multi-generational family members. Most previous work in this area involves software enabling younger family members to monitor their parents. We have found, however, that older adults are equally if not more interested in the activities of younger family members. The major obstacle preventing them from participating in information sharing is the technology itself. Therefore, we developed a layered interface approach that offers simple interaction to older users. In our system, users can choose to enter information into a computerized calendar or write it by hand on digital paper calendars. All of the information is automatically shared among everyone in the distributed family. By making the interface more accessible to older uses, we promote symmetrical sharing of information among both older and younger family members. We present our participatory design process, describe the user interface and report on a field study in 3 households.

problem solving

Abstract not found