 I think we're as live with the live stream as we're going to get, so let's go and kick this off. I proposed this session on notifications, filtering and prioritizing and postponing inspired by Amber's talk this morning on sort of calm computing. And the basic premise is that no matter what situation we're in, there are probably some notifications that we would like to know about. Even if you're like out in you like flew to Thailand to go like sit in a hut to go right by yourself and not be you know be away from all technology. If there was a tsunami coming you probably would want to be notified for example. So there are like no matter how isolated you want to be there are probably some examples of notifications you want to receive. But the question is how do we figure out what those are and then how do we build tools that sort of adapt to users and or help empower users to tweak that without giving them the here are 100 checkboxes please navigate and check them all and uncheck them all whenever anything changes in your life according to your like interruptibility. So is it notifications or is it interruptions? I guess I see notifications as one form of interruption. So that's your question. So one of the things that I've played with a bit over the past couple of years is some of the apps that are designed to give us emergency notifications. So to tell you for example whether there's a tornado warning or if you might be a midwestern transplant in New England whether there's a tornado warning in your hometown. So you can you know check and see if it's still standing an hour later or maybe you know you don't want to know that. But some of them will have sort of a classification where they've pre-prioritized okay we think that tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, you know some of these most severe weather events, terrorism warnings, we'll get what we call a red priority and other things will have a yellow priority green you know etc. And you can select which priority groups you want to receive which seems like a nice at least start it filtering without having to have under-check boxes. Well and so they should tell you right which ones are in which group. On the other hand despite having done that I'm still getting amber alerts from Nebraska which I don't really care about. So that's just my first thought. I guess the main question here is whether you want somebody to regulate your notifications or with the Samsung use you want to take control right yourself. So I can imagine having something like a tornado warning notification that could be regulated by the government or kind of local authorities. But then some of the more personal stuff especially social notifications from your friends or your or strangers in your friends list. You might want to avoid that or you might have certain preferences about notifications you want to receive. So I guess the combination should be you know having personal notifications that you set yourself but also having some sort of overarching you know government level authority level notification system that should be regularly that should be available to anyone. I mean SMS does have this level of thing built into it all going all the way up from the amber alerts which local police can broadcast sort of at will and they're learning to use all the way up to the presidential alert which as far as I can tell all modern phones are required to not let you disable. The anecdotes I've read about it describe it was basically intended for that last minute message saying it's been nice knowing everybody the nukes are incoming there's nothing we can do. But it's all built into the SMS system. But that's but that's for one stream of notification that's not for managing your personal notifications or notifications for the things you have elected to be informed about. So if you don't yeah I mean I would actually say anytime someone says like do we need a layer above this it means you don't actually understand the problem. Like if you don't understand the problem add a layer of abstraction it seems like you solved the problem but you didn't and so it'll be be aware of any time if you think that's that's an approach to take. So I'm I try to try to solve problem that first documenting specific examples. So we talked about the different like like tsunami is one example tornado warning is another example and you can think about well there's all these if I travel to some location like if I go to Florida and maybe I'm not from the US I don't know that hurricanes are a problem I don't know to turn on hurricane warnings. Right so asking users to manage every single kind of catastrophe is not reasonable. So there needs to be there does need to be some sort of layering I will grant you that or at least grouping categorizing things like that where it's like warn me about you know weather events dangerous weather events or dangerous environment natural disasters perhaps. But that's a government or some other authority generated advisory stream of important notifications that's much less bothersome to me than having my watch buzz every six seconds because someone I know checked in on swarm in another city. Back in the bad old days when we all used good old days when we used to check our email in eighty by twenty four text windows we had tools for dealing with our notification stream proc mail is Turing complete not necessarily the best interface but it was a tool for handling exactly this kind of thing you write rules for what you want to deal with and it and it evaluates the things the messages that come in and does what you tell it to and it's just that nobody's really building those kinds of tools for social mobile notifications. Well one one thing that came to my mind when you said this is that notifications in fact are great habit building affordances so every time habit building affordances so if you if an app wants you to use that app more often and notification is a great external stimuli that will bring you back to the app and get you into a certain it will make you repeat a certain action with a certain frequency so that it forms a habit right so it's it's a great it's a great design tool if it's done correctly yes but most people doing it don't it's really easy to overdo do it wrong yeah there's two ways one is all these people oh sorry yeah there's two ways you can get those notifications one is on instagram hey this person liked your photo this person commented this person said you a facebook message but then there's the other you've waited 24 hours and now you have 10 credits that you can use on farmville right which is a hey you need to go back in and and then start another process so that'll start this process to get you some more points for addictive gaming the question is how can you get an alert without having to have that message like without having to get a push notification is there is there a different way that you can get an alert I mean there's the badge on apps right that like show you how many messages you haven't read which can cause quite a bit of anxiety actually um so like do you really need all like for instance I got locked out of my work email account and I had been checking that all the time compulsively and I can't check it and I call up service desk and they won't they weren't even there so I just don't you know it's been very relaxing right where I would like maybe a push notification that says check your email now and this is the only time you can check it or something like that but if something really crazy comes through then somebody can elevate it and say you really need this message which is why I tell people send me a text message if I really need to answer this email because I don't want to check it otherwise they may just like a follow-up so would you kind of pause it that we need certain degrees of notifications so some notifications that are have just a natural just a strong bigger magnitude or more urgency attached to them the issue is that that already is there with email right there's the urgent message and people have people who send messages that aren't necessarily urgent start to abuse it if they can have it right so if I tell somebody hey um here's my personal phone number that's opted in that they're close enough to me that they'll be able to tell me about some emergency that needs to happen and that I I as a human know that group and a machine can't tell that for me and then I might get the right message that way like right now I'm doing experiment I'm not checking my work mail for a week and seeing if something's urgent enough if people can route around and find a communication channel to reach me at then right I think part of the disconnect that I was hearing is that urgent and important that's decided by the recipient not the sender at least in most cases for personal stuff in a business context it could be different I think it's also tied to uh rising etiquette of how to communicate with each other as there are multiple or an increasing number of ways of communicating so for example I open up Skype and my mom calls me immediately and is like oh I saw you were online yes I'm always online it doesn't mean you need to call me she hasn't quite understood how yeah hi mom she hasn't quite understood how that interface works and I think it's a when people use it in the in the wrong way you realize that there is an etiquette and a known way of communicating and so as a sender unless I'm a spam bot I or you know or a company or whatever it is I wouldn't want to tell you this is an urgent message unless I personally thought you really had to see it and right there's that idea of if I'm online I'm automatically available when in reality I might not be um but yeah and people do abuse that quite a bit like if but that way I put that I'm available on gchat and then people like show up and it's okay cool but in a way I am available when I do that and I only set that one I'm actually available to talk but there's not one uniform way of doing it either right because I default to invisible yeah right whereas the the sort of the email default is like imagine we took that ball of string at the entrance that we have there and we all uh tied like a little bit of string um uh around our pinkies and then like put that string into the middle uh anyone of us could reach in the middle and be like and like pull on the string that's like hooked to anyone else that's kind of what email does it sort of allows anyone to like reach out and like pull the string that's like holding onto your finger and be like hey pay attention to this um yeah and that's but I want to try to uh separate like the communication person to person notification problem because that's that's like a whole other discussion from the uh notification problem that comes from like devices and computers as the extension of self like from a actual like cyborg perspective when the way that we use these things as uh like just enhancements of our eyes enhancements of our of our hands and and just as like machines right so um like sending agents out that or do things for you a lot of apps sort of act that way and then tell you when they're done or tell you when things are happening on your behalf even those seem overwhelming so maybe we can come up with examples of technologies that aren't obnoxious when they give us notifications other than the super emergency ones what are low level ones that don't bug you when they give you a notification this is not an answer this is a separate thread but the kind of notifications that I miss and that I would love to have are ways to notify a sender that the communication is going to be shared with more than just the sender and the recipient so I really like having intermediaries for for communication and I like publishing communications with me and uh to be polite to the sender it's usually nice to get some kind of consent or to make sure that they know and there isn't there isn't an obvious easy way to do that and so sometimes if I'm if I if I feel that the sender was abusing their right to get in touch I don't worry too much about doing that but I would still love to have an even more polite way one thing that comes to my mind as a technology that is super non obnoxious and yes I'm sorry one example that comes to my mind of a notification technology that is super non obnoxious even though it notifies me of all sorts of things I don't care about is the the macOS notifications where it'll sort of float a little rectangle in a corner of the screen in the periphery for a few seconds and then it goes away on its own and if I want to go looking for it there's a couple of things I can click through to go find that notification and otherwise if I don't care to take any action it dismisses itself and I think that is lovely and it drives me up the wall because it breaks me out of flow it's this thing that is not important to me at this second is now in my field of view flashing at me and that's a you versus me thing and I've been tuning it down and further and further but it's just it's one of those things that I'm glad it works for some people because otherwise it'd be really awful one thing I think that works well is Twitter for me because it sits there until I go and I find it and I don't have to engage with it and there's no expectation that I will actually necessarily engage with it there's so there's very low feedback responses but if I want it it's there it's in the summarized easy to scroll through form something I actually find the opposite with Twitter because maybe this is partly a username issue I have at T and so my notifications on Twitter are pretty useless people using it to mean all kinds of different things but Twitter also has a whole settings page for email notifications with 22 different checkboxes of do you want to receive emails about this this this there are 22 of those literally and that that's ridiculous to expect people to manage and or tune based on time of day or availability or anything like that it's funny my Twitter email notifications are just set to off but but I I I thought it was interesting Beth what you were saying about how there's no expectation that you'll engage with it because those expectations are so socially created so there was a time I think when there was no particular expectation that a person would necessarily answer their phone when you called because they might not be available whereas I think we at least went through a phase with cell phones where people would answer them in basically all times and all places and so now it creates a much higher degree of anxiety when somebody doesn't answer a call and there's a greater perception of an obligation to respond immediately that has been created through this sort of pocket notification culture between cell phones and text messages and so I think one of the things I'm hearing is you don't feel any particular social obligation to engage with Twitter nor do I but maybe 10 tech does just because of differences in how we have engaged with the medium previously in our lives and the expectations we might have created there and it's I find it to be sort of this floating problem of anytime I engage more with a particular medium I unintentionally create more of an expectation that I will be available by that medium when other people want me there as opposed to when I want to be there I guess this is more of just like an observation but I think it's really interesting that the number of options one has kind of like decreases the likelihood that your understanding of the etiquette around that service is like wait do I say decrease anyway your understanding of the etiquette becomes much different than like someone else's so like if if you DM me I have a notification set up that will like show on my phone and Twitter is a thing that I'm engaged with really actively and so that's actually a pretty good way to get a hold of me a lot of other people are like wait you DM like that's a thing that you do like why did you DM me like there's no way I'll ever see that and I was like wait really because that's like a perfect way to get a hold of me and like that's just because I have created a set of rules that like create my own little Twitter world and I forget that like my Twitter world is not your Twitter world I mean I remember probably this point 10 years ago my .plan file listed all the ways to get in touch with me in order of preference Aaron I think has something like that on his website now listing off all the contact methods and which ones work the best but it's something I'd love to if that were just in software I think that's a great argument for having some kind of a site that people use as the way to get in touch with them that translates right the actual the actual mechanism that sends a message or a notification to you in a way that you'll see in the next six hours is going to be different you might change it between now and this time next year I shouldn't need to know how you're changing the tools you use well one thing I just want to say in response to what you said before is that every time you create a new account you're creating a sense of self on that site right you create it as you create a self that kind of exists independently from kind of your offline life right and this self can interact with others through these different channels right and I'm not sure I agree with your premise but go ahead and then you what you typically find is that your preferences of being contacted through these different channels through these different kind of selves on these different sites varies with the people you want to interact with so say you have a preference to keep in touch with your mom through Skype right and keep in touch with your friends through Facebook and through your indie developer community through another site right I mean there they can be different contexts and different contexts afford different channels of communication so in that regard notifications will be necessarily context-driven and it is really difficult to find one unique way to manage all these different notifications I guess I'm weird because I'd rather just have a unified client so that I don't have to think about what transport substrate I'm using to talk to someone I talked to my wife through Slack Twitter SMS email I think that's probably it for a day-to-day basis no no no no no so she's an example she's an example of sort of the standard in my I have a question for you quickly I was wondering so we're still talking about person-to-person communication in some way and I was just wondering what you're oh yes and I was wondering what what examples you might have of more cyborg type notification to self things we might find or yeah what you what you were referencing because Twitter notifications or Instagram notifications they're all still somebody else there's a reaction to something out there rather than a self enhancement of self that's a great question because I was going to ask the same thing but of everyone else so I'll I started with the weather slash disaster example where you're kind of using these weather sensory services like I don't identify with that as a friend or like you know it's it's to me it's just the service it's just a sensor or you could say the same thing for traffic sensors so if I am or or like civil unrest like that should be another sensor like if I'm walking in a city I would like to get an alert if there is a protest a block away or if I'm walking towards a protest or some other sort of action I should you know walk around it in general there's sort of like the physical space physical hazards category of alerts like that then there are the alerts that you'd like to receive about all the different little pieces of yourself you tend to like your web server so if my web server goes down I would like to get an alert at some priority level that oh I need to go fix that right let's see other other indicators if there's something happening around my house and I'm not home that's another sort of physical not not directly to to me but to something that's mine alert indicator so I guess that's or you can also set up filters so I want to know if someone mentions like indie web camp the the days or the week before indie web camp actually occurs at a higher level of urgency than say normally or right after like you know between them and when it's when it's not as interesting but yeah I'd love to hear other examples from other people of what kind of notifications do you want or don't want that don't have to do with communication with another person I really want my notification settings to be editable by my friends and maybe there's a fall off like the people who are closest get to edit them more but often the things that I am interested in are not things that I am able to name especially these kinds of environmental changes I mean for instance I'm not home it happens that now there's a tornado season I'm away for a month anyone who lives near me should be able to add that kind of notification somehow to the priority thing for me that would then get passed through whatever the best channels are to send me a priority a regional note um since this is a cyborg conference I think that like health health related notifications would be really nice if you had some type of I mean especially I think people who have diabetes essentially have this already you can have that little port that is connected to a beeper type device like on your belt loop and it shows you stuff but um you can kind of imagine a world in which like other things like your vitamin levels would kind of trigger an alert or some other like chemical balances in your body hormones stuff like that I think that could be like a really cool future thing I would like to be able to be subscribed to other people's emotional states or if they haven't eaten in five hours so I can help get them food or if they have diabetes if I can help them with the sugar levels right like if my dad has too much cholesterol or if he's eaten too many hamburgers I want to you know because there are situations in which you might get an alert about yourself but you can't help yourself at all but somebody else can help you right so like I can see that going really awry just thinking about clue the app clue if you're a lady maybe you know what this is it's like a period tracking app and imagine if like your boss or your boyfriend or whoever could subscribe to like when you were ostensibly like pmsing and then every angry thing that you said during that time is like oh well I got this notice that like it's Heather's special time of year so let's ignore all of her concerns something that you need an app for I mean as in other people can tell so this is a it's a possible thing it's a possible thing what Heather's saying is actually really important because it does establish a certain degree of social surveillance right if you make the data available even if it's just a close circle of really close friends still they know about it and you know that they know so that automatically changes the way you behave or the kind of data you would like to release to that circle of friends right I did I had a I had an alert that I would I think is really well I think would be really beneficial for everyone to have and that is an alert that tracks our energy usage and consumption so is when you're driving around aimlessly your car would have a built-in system that says hey you've used a lot of gas you know what like that impact has you know around the world you know that sort of thing or if you leave the lights on you say oh you know you burned like X amount of coal by leaving your lights on and so it's in a sense it's like a health app but for society and makes people conscientious of that it's one thing I've done is play World of Warcraft and a bunch of the it involves so that it has the ability to add configurable alerts absolutely anything that happens in game basically and it does involve a lot of effort and so I think it's that how do you how do you reduce the amount of effort and anyone who's worked with automatic alert systems for actual systems and operations there's a lot of effort involved in trying to make those important and useful and I think we have the tools yet besides sort of social crowdsourcing things like Twitter retweets for ways so we haven't figured out the automated version of is this important or not I'm just going to put in a quick comment about a thing that drives me baddie which is there are a lot of times when I would like absolutely no notifications at all except of things that are life-threatening right is there a tornado or hurricane whatever and I would really like those things that are life threatening to override the silent setting on my phone I'm not entirely clear on why they don't right so if I'm one of the places I often am sitting in a courtroom where everybody has their phone on silent and it's a windowless courtroom and there's a tornado coming for the courthouse I think we all want our phones to go off and make a noise yes including the judge's phone and I have games that can disregard my hardware silent switch I don't understand why my emergency notification app doesn't so just a follow-up from the life-threatening a lot of people a lot of medical forms have the notion of an emergency contact what about that notification so this isn't necessarily a social thing per se because the person who the emergency is about is probably not the one contacting you it's probably their doctor or some other institution contacting you because that your numbers showed up in the form or your contact information showed up in the form should that notification also break the silence on your silent device on your mobile device what's that vibrate is it time to switch to the next session okay well thanks everyone we took a lot of notes in the etherpad feel free to to bring enough brain dump more I'm hoping this will end up on a wiki somewhere a product I mean it sounds like it probably will go into some guidelines on how you might make products that way if it goes into a product then it's just one product but if it goes into some guidelines then many people making then it can affect multiple products and then hopefully it doesn't go into other use cases right really yeah otherwise it gets brittle I know we're wrapping up I do want to say one thing in response to 10 text last comment which is I don't know if I want that emergency contact contacting me to break my silent setting but it would be nice if there were some kind of flag that this phone call coming in from a number I don't recognize is somebody's you know important emergency contact on the other hand as Beth said as soon as it's possible to do something like that spammer's will and this you know right but I mean you can imagine that like if there is some way for them to like dial it like my number is this extension you know 753 or whatever and that extension like they would dial it but on your phone it'd be like it would be the code to say oh this your phone this is when your phone number has been given out as an emergency contact right this is like the you know the the like the gmail plus thing right the google voice number for my emergency