The transparency I'd most like to see

 

There is always lots of talk on the web about privacy. With an election looming we can only expect this to increase.

I'm a teeny weeny bit paranoid about privacy. I shred, regularly. But I'm also an advocate of being open online.

But like a lot of arguments the issue isn't as simple as privacy yes or no. You can say you live in London without mentioning the exact street. Or as Tom said once, "Privacy. Get over it."

Now, I don't want to debate privacy here. I really don't. People cleverer than I have written better things elsewhere. But I do want to talk about a type of transparency that would make my life easier.

We've all experienced frustrating email conversations where you're trying to arrange a meeting with someone. Sometimes they go like this:

A: Yeah let's meet up, when's good for you?

B: Sometime next week?

A: Yeah great. Tuesday?

B: Perfect. Morning or afternoon?

Natural delay of a day or so.

A: Oh, sorry. Tuesday has gone now. Internal thing. How about Wednesday?

B: I can't do Wednesday. I could next Monday though? 10am?

A: Ahhh. I'm free all day Monday apart from 10. Thursday at 3?

B: Perfect. See you then.

Natural delay of a day or so.

A: Sorry. Really sorry, client coming in at 10 now.

And so on.

It seems odd to me that I can very easily find pictures, phone numbers, address, likes and dislikes, marital statuses, of people I barely know and yet there's no easy way to see the availability of slight associates. I'm not suggesting making our calendars available to everyone, but I would like to see a pretty basic busy/not busy thing similar to how Google show you the chat status of people you have previously emailed.

 

And not just inter-company, something broader than that. Something vague. Something useful if you're trying to gauge the availability of someone but useless to a stranger. Something where you can get an idea of hereish, soonish, nowish.

Something glanceable.

 

In this example, because I've had a few emails with Rob I can quickly see his basic availability. No details, just free or busy, like the calendar at the start of this post. I know this is not perfect interaction design, it's just a quick sketch.

<ducks>

Comments

[Andrea]

Some acquaintances of mine had this idea with a service called Mudjo(.com) that allows people within a restricted group to see each other's status, i.e. 'Available for drinks/movies' and other things.

I think it's in a private beta now but I can nudge them gently and ask what the status is. It needs some good funding methinks.

It would work a bit like booking someone in advance and naturally the requirement would be synchronisation with mail clients, other calendars, basecamp, who knows what other project management tools and things are out there. Facebook events that you say you'll attend.

What about customising it? Like when you set your own meetings and availability to be able to say "Busy but can make exceptions" ... or if people belong to a certain group they become a priority!

[Anjali Ramachandran]

Nice one. A professor at Columbia University actually makes his Google Calendar available to look at so people know when he is and isn't free to make appointments.: http://www.sree.net/sked/

The constant back-and-forthing that you describe when you try to schedule meetings with someone really can be irritating!

[Rob Mortimer]

I am currently unavailable to read this post. I will read it when I return on the 26th.

Nice idea, keep at it!

[Fer]

I just saw this. Funny how you start seeing stuff after reading about it. https://app.timebridge.com/lp/meetwithme

[Tom Carden]

"I would like to see a pretty basic busy/not busy thing similar to how Google show you the chat status of people you have previously emailed."

Isn't it telling that you're invisible though? I'm not sure you want other people filling up your calendar for you, just like you don't want people interrupting you while you're reading your email.

[Patrick]

Tungle does something like that:
http://tungle.me/Home/LearnMore.htm

[Ben]

Tom, I don't want people filling up my calendar, I want them suggesting meeting at times when they know I'm likely to be free. To be honest Matt Jones' heat map idea visualises this better than my crude calendar up there. (More on that soon.)

Regarding chat. I just hate IM.

[Lee Maguire]

With regards to the making available of detail-free time blocks for meeting scheduling:

It's called "read-free-busy" privilege in the CalDAV world - see
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791#section-6.1.1

Calendaring servers such as DaviCal have the ability to publish availability. http://wiki.davical.org/w/Free_Busy

You can get an overview of the usual visual representations by searching for "freebusy" on an image search engine, but yeah - I don't recall seeing a good visual "Sparkline" for an individual's calendar compared to the viewer's - especially one that takes into account geographical proximity. (I've always got a default-hidden dopplr calendar feed that I can flip on for sanity checking.)

[liza]

I don't even keep a calendar for myself. If something's really not to be missed, I write a post it note and stick it onto my computer. Anyone trying to peek into my week would have to peek into my mind, where time and events must be coded somehow, but frankly, it's a mystery to me.