Asynchronous Negotiated Access

Abstract

Scheduling access to people and selectively sharing the state of one’s activities are essential elements of collaborating with others. These processes are fundamental to arranging face-to-face meetings and coordinating access to shared information. Examples include scheduling meetings, contacting others in real time (by phone or instant messaging), and checking on the changing status of a jointly-authored document. In this paper, we first discuss challenging social and technical problems associated with scheduling and sharing activities and then describe a novel computational technique designed to help mediate access to people and their work products. We argue that providing effective negotiated-access will be an issue of growing significance as computational and wireless technologies make us increasingly and perhaps overly accessible.