[sugar] Mesh View and XO-presence

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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Suppose that I am participating in 3 shared activity sessions, all public.
~ I am switching back and forth between them, perhaps copying things from
one to another, and occasionally checking in on the third.  The current
mesh view design shows my XO icon as attached only to the activity which
is currently shown on my screen.  I feel strongly that this is the wrong
design choice.  Instead, my XO icon should be shown next to all the
activity instances of which I am a member.

Abstractly, placing my XO next to only one activity instance conveys the
wrong information.  Just because I am currently viewing a single activity
does not mean I am not an active participant in many activities.  There
may be activities for which being an important participant only requires
very occasional participation.  For example, I may be the lead author on a
team paper, but not shown in that activity because I am only checking it
every hour or so.

The current design is a privacy violation.  IM programs typically provide
optional idleness detection, and many users disable it entirely. When the
user enables idleness detection, the user may opt either to show idleness
on the basis of total system activity (e.g. whether screensaver is active)
or on the basis of IM activity. There is never an option to indicate
whether each IM window has focus at any given time, because users do not
want everyone else to know whether they are looking at that particular
window.  For a classic example, see http://bash.org/?365072 .

In a school setting, this visualization directly enforces a harsh
classroom discipline, in which the teacher demands that everyone look only
at one particular activity, and can tell immediately if they look
somewhere else.

The current design is tremendously inefficient.  Every state change, like
moving between activities, causes O(N) work in the best case (and
currently O(N^2)).  In a classroom of 30 active students, updating status
once a minute results in a broadcast every two seconds on average, with
many collisions, grinding the network to a halt.  Many of our classrooms
have far more than 30 students.  If the user has used 3 activities in the
past minute, the resulting visualization is also misleading at best.

Making a single XO appear multiple times in the mesh view is not
confusing, because each of these XO's is reduced in size, and clearly
represents the association of a user with a particular activity.  It is
much more confusing for a user to look in the mesh view and see that her
own XO icon is not attached to the activities that she is sharing.

Please clarify the mesh view, improve the user's privacy, and reduce
network congestion, by not sending notifications regarding which activity
has focus in the window manager, and instead showing each XO icon next to
each activity in which it is participating.

- --Ben
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