Anthony Johnson and Ted Selker
MobiCollab explores the non-intrusive use of mobile phones in meetings. Currently mobile phones are only non-intrusive during meetings if used for text messaging, but do not provide a specific set of tools for meetings capture. MobiColab is a toolkit for exploration of new mobile collaboration ideas. Currently, we have two major projects built of this platform:
MobileEssence is the main platform. It provides a mechanism for users to join a meeting and seeing who is in that meeting. During the meeting, the participants are able to make commitments during the meeting. The action of committing records at 15 second snippet of audio, starting 10 seconds before the button was pushed. Users are also able to record text, video and any other information that is available
This information is recorded back to the main MobileEssence server, which provides all the users with access to the information. This information can be viewed during the meeting, or after-wards through a web-based interface. Users are able to annotate this information or add notes to the meeting.
Townhall is a project exploring the possibility of using mobile devices to allow for micro-ratings. Micro-ratings are a logical evolution of the notion of a 360 degrees performance review.
Distributed Teams and Technology. This paper described some of ideas behind the Townhall and MobileEssence projects, including the a short history of collaboration technology, and some of the underlying concepts.
Need more info? Please contact: anthonyj [at] mit.edu