It's About More Than Free/Busy
"My availability for a meeting with you is not simply a free/busy database lookup," argues Yori Nelken, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based TimeBridge, Inc. TimeBridge was founded in May 2005, and after two years of research, software development and beta trials, is about ready to release the next version of its meeting scheduling service that intentionally incorporates the social aspects of meeting scheduling.
In its early market research, TimeBridge set out to discover the logic that people followed when deciding whether or not to attend an upcoming meeting or event. They discovered that one's so-called free/busy status at the proposed time was way down the list, at point four or five. "Who proposed the meeting is the number one factor taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to attend a meeting," reports Nelken. "Followed closely by 'What's the activity about?'" Additional factors more critical than free/busy include 'Who else is messagingnews.com 13 going to be at the meeting?' and 'Where is the meeting being held?' According to TimeBridge research, only after knowing all these factors did the average respondent look at their free/busy time to see what they might already have scheduled. "In other words, the average person pre-decides whether or not to attend without reference to their free/busy time. Once someone has an inclination to attend, then they check their current schedule," says Nelken.
Nelken has further evidence that the social aspects of meeting scheduling are much more critical than free/busy status. Nelken reports, "Based on analyzing usage data collated during our first closed beta, meetings that achieve a quorum of attendees are much less likely to be deadlocked by the last or second-to-last person responding with their availability". For example, if five people are invited to a meeting and four have indicated their availability to attend at a certain time, the probability that the fifth person will say they can't come is much less. Nelken explains such behavior by pointing to the high social cost to the fifth person if they deadlock the meeting. "Four people have already indicated that they'll come," he says. "So, if the fifth and final person says they can't, it's going to throw everyone else off. Rather than causing bad feelings in the other four, the fifth will usually do whatever it takes to shift their schedule around so they can attend the meeting."
Scheduling approaches that rely solely on free/busy information are problematic. "It's both unreliable and impolite to rely only on free/busy for meeting scheduling," charges Nelken. It is unreliable because many people don't keep their free/busy time up-to-date, they don't include personal commitments, and they create "soft" meetings with themselves to get work done. "Availability is a dynamic process of deciding where best to spend your time and effort during any given day," says Nelken. "When new opportunities arise, people re-evaluate as to what is most important in the moment." This comes back to all of the other factors highlighted in TimeBridge's research about the logic people use when deciding whether or not to attend a meeting.
Nelken believes free/busy is an impolite way of setting up meetings. Just sending a meeting demand to someone else for a specific time is the height of rudeness to him. The low communicative and expressive power of a meeting request is insufficient to convey important social cues that are much better conveyed through email or a phone call. "Yes, free/busy is part of it," he says, "but only at the right time."
Having said all of that, Nelken is quick to see the value of widely sharing free/busy time within the organization and across organizational boundaries, but only within the context of the wider social and workflow aspects of arranging meetings. To this end, TimeBridge is a member of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, which is very big on sharing free/busy times, and also notes that TimeBridge's own service will enable the sharing of free/busy time between users. MS/TMP