COOPerator's Agenda

The agenda serves two purposes:

• It may be used as a personal agenda and
• it also acts as a group agenda.

For strictly personal use, the agenda may be seen as an electronic variation of a pocket diary. Each group member has his own agenda in which he takes down his appointments and activities.

The group agenda is simply the result of the accumulation of all individual agendas. Nevertheless, the organisation of a face-to-face meeting can be simplified by using this instrument. Originally, we envisioned this facility to be able to find times at which a group would be able to meet and automatically make the appointment. Each group member should be alerted for an approaching meeting whenever he would log on to the host computer to synchonise his work with the group's shared workspace. Eventually, this function has been changed due to the insight that only a person himself has full knowledge of his plans. Thus, the agenda will merely suggest (instead of enforce) a date and time for a group engagement and all members should manually confirm this proposal.

Compared to the 'normal procedure' for planning a meeting, the system can save the group members a lot of energy and time. Particularly in an environment that is characterised by remote interaction, it is not easy to contact all peers by telephone to arrange a rendezvous. Especially in a large group, this may easily lead to a lot of calls back and forth. By using COOPerator's group agenda, the amount of time it takes to plan a meeting is less dependent on the size of the group.

In reality, the use of a group agenda is not unlikely to fail. For numerous reasons, personal agendas may not be up to date and thus cannot be relied upon for planning a group engagement. As Meijer [1994] points out, the cooperators may:

• forget to enter private appointments into the electronic agenda or
• are to busy to keep their agenda constantly up to date (this is likely to occur when they are not constantly using The COOPerator) or
• feel uncomfortable using an automated agenda.

For The COOPerator to be useful, the group members should frequently log on to the host computer. This page merely stresses that fact.