[Sugar-devel] Automatically Join shared activity

[Danny Iland]

Hello,

I am a graduate student at University of California, Santa Barbara,
developing an emergency communication activity for OLPC. The core idea
is that when XOs come into Wi-Fi range of each other, they pass
text-based messages back and forth, with the hope that eventually one
XO will gain internet access, and upload all messages on the device to
an Ushahidi crisis map. We are attempting to implement this using a
shared Activity.

However, for this to be feasible, we need a way for our Activity to
look for instances of the Activity being shared by XOs nearby, and to
automatically join the activity. We don't want the user to have to be
in the Neighborhood view to find other users, or to take any action to
connect to nearby XOs. Any advice with regards to this is greatly
appreciated.

So if we are using an XO with our activity open, sharing enabled, and
we come into Wi-Fi range of another XO with our activity open, the two
activities should automatically share data. How can we accomplish
this? We think a solution may exist using Telepathy and Buddies, but
we are very unsure of exactly how to do it.

Thank you,
Danny Iland
iland at cs.ucsb.edu