YAPC
|
talks
45 minutes
Unfortunately, important meetings bearing on the design of the software typically occur without a terminal present, forcing each participant to rely solely on the contents of his brain or whatever hardcopy was anticpated to be relevant. Copious paper notes are taken so that sense can be made of the proceeding afterwards, when a terminal is available.
The Augmented Discussion Experiment tests two propositions:
Many meetings would be better off if held in a multi-user textual environment like IRC or MOO, providing access to a local terminal for data and connectivity for many users from different physical locations
The implementation of the ADE uses ircd 2.10.2 running on a SparcStation 20 running Solaris 2.5 for the discussion environment, and Kevin Lenzo's infobot version 0.43.6 using Perl 5.005_03 under Windows NT 4.0 for the augmentation.
The changes to infobot will be discussed at length, particularly the extensions which provide access to the corporate databases. These extensions access a wide range of databases using ODBC, and use several different parsing patterns to react in appropriate ways to normal conversation. Future direction of the ADE infobot will also be discussed based on the findings of engineers putting it into use in real design and defect meetings. Finally, there are several instances of completely unexpected usage of the ADE which will be thrown out to the audience for discussion.