Staff Meeting Notes 8 July 2004

Announcements

• Aparna Kadakia started on Tuesday to start the QA efforts with Chandler.
• Suzette is moving back to Arizona for personal reasons. We will miss her.
• Brian Skinner is leaving, though will probably remain as a volunteer. We will miss him.
• We will publish an org chart soon. (We're just waiting for Esther to come back from vacation and tweak it.)

Demos

Mimi walked through SharingRevisited. After much circling, the Design group decided to focus on a few use cases. They felt that calendar sharing was the most important, so paid particular attention to that.

After looking at the limited use cases, they found that it was rare for both the sharer and the sharee to try to change something. In reality, especially for smaller group scenarios, it won't be as big a problem as we thought it was. As you increase the number of people in a group, usually you have one or two people organizing the event and everyone else just showing up. Thus again, we're hoping that conflict resolution isn't such a big problem. There are still a lot of open issues, particularly in how you terminate sharing and resharing (person A shares with B and B reshares with C). Mimi thinks we'll need to live with sharing for a while before we are really able to figure out what we want.

Chao talked a little bit about how we're moving away from pure peer-to-peer for Canoga. Servers are becoming more important for us. Stuart is planning on using WebDAV with all its features for sharing. There were some questions about how frequently things would be shared and what latency was acceptable. Mitch has the sense that there could be a twenty or thirty seconds and that would be okay. If conversations need to be faster, the users could move to instant messaging.

Mitch opined that while we have gone through several different designs for sharing, this time it's more likely to be the final version. We're much more grounded this time around because this version has been much better informed by engineering input. While we will still need to iterate to get to the full final feature set, this design will allow us to get data from point A to point B in a reliable fashion. Mitch expects to blog more soon on sharing.

Note that while collections will be shared through WebDAV, if you only want to share one item, users will be able to do that with email as the transport, via email attachments. Furthermore, if users can share via email, they presumably ought to be able to share via IM.

-- DuckySherwood - 13 Jul 2004