Kate's Blog
A Future World for Distributed Teams
My blog has been a bit quiet because I just spent 2 weeks in California. Since I work on a globally distributed team (see Working Around the World), it helps us to meet face to face once every 6 months or so to get the kind of interaction you just don't get over the phone. There are some problems that can easily be solved with a few hours in front of a whiteboard, yet take months of phone calls and emails - that's if we can negotiate the difficulties of remaining polite and considerate when it's 6:00 am for at least one of us. The PAO are the best team at working together remotely that I've been part of (I know they'll be reading this, but I'd say it anyway). I'm grateful for my colleagues' abilities at appropriately using the technologies available to us - email, IM, Skype, and of course the telephone.
Recently we had some discussions about whether Second Life could be useful to assist with team meetings, as Sun uses it for marketing events. But the public nature of Second Life seems a deterrent, and it's been a bit slow for some of us.
A side benefit of my trip to California was that this time - for the first time in a long while - I managed to attend the Open House at Sun Labs. Of course, it reminds me of how far I've strayed from R&D, which causes nostalgia rather than regret these days. There were lots of cool things to see. Paul Lamere is cataloguing music by analyzing its content (see Search Inside The Music), which could certainly help me manage my playlists better. There was some interesting work putting Java on set-top boxes, improving e-commerce security, and exploring alternatives to traditional HTML web interfaces. I didn't have enough time to see everything I'd have liked to see.
The project that I found most immediately relevant (well, once I have a faster broadband connection) was MPK20, a 3D collaborative work environment. Each person has an avatar that moves around the virtual building - the workspace. MPK20 combines high-quality audio with the ability to virtually walk around, listen in on interesting conversations, and share documents with colleagues. There are individual offices and team rooms, with whiteboards, web browsers, and other applications you can interact with. We could have a team meeting with a closed door, as well as open it to others when we want to share further, or we could post documents and websites outside our team room to allow others to comment. Perhaps we'd be able to leave notes for people, or teleport over to them if they're around. If they are in a public space (or a room with an open door), it's possible to listen in for a minute to see if the conversation could be interrupted or not. The avatars give a level of personal interaction (though not body language) that is not possible using IM and email. Of course, this is still a research project, and is not ready for our use yet. But I have hopes of being able to use it one day - sooner rather than later would be good!
Posted at 09:59AM 04 May, 2007 by Kate Morris in Sun |