Summarizing brainstorm ideas from the design list thread: 0.7 Planning (Reframing the issue) for Plausible collaboration scenarios that take advanage of Chandler's virtuality and cross-platform, standards based sharing functionality.

http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2005-December/thread.html

Please feel free to add any that you think are missing.

Sharing teacher class schedules at an elementary school

I've a friend who's working with his daughter's school trying to come up with a solution for the teachers to edit and publish calendars. Those teachers are on Mac and use iCal. The sharing feature is not good enough for them because lots of students have PCs. Why don't they use a web calendar? I suspect an offline story (the teacher updating the calendar on her Mac laptop while not necessarily being connected) but I can't confirm that. Anyway, he was very interested by Chandler and the possibility of using Cosmo to share. The fact that it's still "experimental" is however an issue for him.

Take away People are using iCal but bumping into its single platform limitation real fast. What's preventing me right now to advertise Chandler more widely though and recommend it to such people is our lack of schema evolution. This is going to be a show stopper for most people. Ted already mentioned this as a hindrance to "Get more users".

Collaborative design list management

Could we as an organization experiment with sharing the Design list as a shared collection?

• Where Sheila and I act as mailing list shepherds, triaging mailing list topics between Done, Now and Later to help focus the conversation?
• Where people can submit crazy ideas so that we have them recorded and stored in the Later area, but the list and community don't feel compelled to stray away from the topics that need to be discussed Now.
• Where people can look in the Done area for "closed issues".
• Where people can tag and label emails by topic area and other people can come search through the list for their pet topic (this would require making tags shareable in some way).
• Where we can stamp certain mailing list items that are time-sensitive and put them on a Design list calendar of events or milestone dates. (ie. this brainstorm will end on Friday at 2PM, the Dashboard presentation will take place on the 22nd.)
• Where we can stamp certain mailing list items as tasks and maintain public, task lists showing how we're responding to the list and delegating responsibility in the community as a direct result of the list. ie. Heikki to look more into short-term PDA strategies

I think this is something we could all use that would directly help in our efforts to moderate and faciliate open-source design.

Shared task management

What about shared task lists for collaborative projects. ie. upcoming CSG meeting or PyCON^? presentation tasks

• We would want some rudimentary emails to be able to send and receive capital N-notifications.
• We would want stamping to work so you can put tasks on the calendar.
• We would want basic ability to triage tasks

Shared resource and conference room management

Office calendars for conference rooms and projectors and things. So that you could reserve a projector or conference room and then send an email out to ping whoever needs to be pinged, right from the app.

How would a small art gallery use it to coordinate front-desk shifts?

Have a calendar for the front desk shift, allow individuals to create entries on it. The coordination part is the horse trading of -- I can only work these times, or these are the times that I can work in priority order. I guess you could imagine a system where everybody put in their preferences and the program tried to accomodate them, and then put people in conflicting schedules in contact with each other to horse trade, etc. I could see that being able to quickly e- mail/IM the creator of a particular entry would be valuable for horse- trading.

How would a photographer's studio use it to coordinate scheduling equipment, traveling and client jobs?

It seems that you need to schedule all of these things together. If you are travelling to a client site, you probably need certain equipment. So maybe a workflow is that you create a client job, see if that involves travelling (somehow linking/manipulating the travel calendar), and indicating which equipment is needed (from a bunch of calendars for the various pieces of equipment). So I'd think you'd want to be able to see all the various calendars involved at once (there might be a lot). This seems like a case that has pretty serious constraints amongst the calendars, at least if you want to do "I need to do a shoot at Jones' in Indiana before Dec 14, 2005, and I need this camera, those lenses, these lights, and those batteries. Now tell me when I can go".

Well I've seen many scenarios where there is 1 calendar for everybody's travel. And I could imagine overlaying that with one other calendar for all resources. As in each resource doesn't need it's own calendar. So when you travel and need to "check out" resources, you look to see if anyone else has checked out any resources for the same time period and look in the Notes field to see what they are.

Which resources are "out" are not kept explicitly in the system. ie. you couldn't query Chandler to find out. But the information is there for people who look at.

It's not perfect, though arguably easier to use than having to manage a separate calendar for every lens, camera and tripod. I doubt that most users would bother doing that. AND it's a big improvement over having to send an email every time you schedule a shoot to see if anyone else has reserved equipment.

How would a family use it to keep track of vacations, school holidays, doctor's appointments and school activities?

We are actually doing this at home now via iCal and a behind the firewall webdav server. I have a calendar and Julie has a calendar. We both subscribe to each other's calendars and to the OSAF office calendar (so she knows my meeting schedule). I also subscribe to a few other calendars. If our kids were in school, I would want to have a calendar of school events/holidays that I could subscribe to. It's not hard to imagine that at some point, each child will have their own calendar. You can go quite far just being able to overlay calendars, because you can see when there are conflicts. Coordinating events has the flavor of: "We want to do x together" when can we do it. Right now that's a manual process, which we usually coordinate either verbally or via e-mail. We also have events that we do with groups of friends and it would be great to be able to coordinate with them. It is annoying to have things like evites, which live outside of the calendar world, because it means pointless copying and pasting of data.