Although we may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of an information worker's work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant executing an unstructured macrotask. We describe the iterative approach we used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.
Scheduling meetings is a difficult task that requires communication, coordination, and negotiation among multiple parties @cite_19 , where each person may have conflicting availabilities, and each may use different, non-interoperable tools @cite_26 . The negotiation is itself complex, as meeting times and locations are resources often governed by intricate constraints and external dependencies @cite_0 . Furthermore, the parties may be geographically dispersed, introducing additional constraints due to time zone differences and the need for communication technologies for remote meetings @cite_33 . This negotiation often needs to occur asynchronously, sometimes requiring several days for the parties to reach consensus @cite_9 @cite_30 . Once a meeting is scheduled, it needs continuous maintenance, as new events often prompt meeting updates and re-schedules.
@cite_30 @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_9 @cite_0 @cite_19
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This paper reports from a field study of a hospital ward and discusses how people achieve coordination through the use of a wide range of interrelated non-digital artifacts, like whiteboards, work schedules, examination sheets, care records, post-it notes etc. These artifacts have multiple roles and functions which in combination facilitate location awareness, continuous coordination, cooperative planning and status overview. We described how actors achieve coordination by using different aspects of these artifacts: their material qualities, the structure they provide as templates and the signs inscribed upon them that are only meaningful to knowledgeable actors. We finally discuss the implication for the design of CSCW tools from the study. We conducted interviews with sixteen members of teams that worked across global time zone differences. Despite time zone differences of about eight hours, collaborators still found time to synchronously meet. The interviews identified the diverse strategies teams used to find time windows to interact, which often included times outside of the normal workday and connecting from home to participate. Recent trends in increased work connectivity from home and blurred boundaries between work and home enabled more scheduling flexibility. While email use was understandably prevalent, there was also general interest in video, although obstacles remain for widespread usage. We propose several design implications for supporting this growing population of workers that need to span global time zone differences. Office automation is used by groups of people with complex communication needs to help them reach business goals such as scheduling, tracking, reviewing, and delegating. Effective individual and group decisions are heavily dependent on communication protocols and social conventions. Because these conventions are so ingrained, they are sometimes not readily available to conscious inspection during the design of communication systems. Even more problematic, system designers may not have first hand knowledge of the conventions and protocol for the range of environments in which their systems will be used. Nevertheless, office systems must work in tandem with these conventions. Wang Laboratories has a continuing program of research directed at identifying the psychological and social factors that come into play during the adoption and use of computer communication systems and the implications of these factors for the design of those systems. Highlights of a three year program of research are presented covering implications for voice mail, electronic mail, and electronic calendars. Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction. Many systems, applications, and features that support cooperative work share two characteristics: A significant investment has been made in their development, and their successes have consistently fallen far short of expectations. Examination of several application areas reveals a common dynamic: 1) A factor contributing to the application’s failure is the disparity between those who will benefit from an application and those who must do additional work to support it. 2) A factor contributing to the decision-making failure that leads to ill-fated development efforts is the unique lack of management intuition for CSCW applications. 3) A factor contributing to the failure to learn from experience is the extreme difficulty of evaluating these applications. These three problem areas escape adequate notice due to two natural but ultimately misleading analogies: the analogy between multi-user application programs and multi-user computer systems, and the analogy between multi-user applications and single-user applications. These analogies influence the way we think about cooperative work applications and designers and decision-makers fail to recognize their limits. Several CSCW application areas are examined in some detail. Introduction. An illustrative example: automatic meeting