Interesting document on some of the technical details behind Stanford's iRoom, part of the larger iWork project. The iRoom is a room designed for highly mediated collaboration among real-world users. The description of the iRoom reads, in part Now they've published a paper on the Event Heap, an attempt at making a coodination framework for all the different software users run in the iRoom. The paper is about solving social coordination problems among software by giving every piece of software access to a shared "space" where all the software can see the messages being passed around and acted on by the other software. One app written in this way is a display tool that coordinates presentation in the physical environment of the iRoom: As an analogy, the Event Heap is, for the software accessing it, like a project room with whiteboards on all the walls -- no matter what you're working on in your little corner, you can read whatever anyone else has written on any of the other surfaces. Much of it might not be of much use to you, but its there if you need it. The gory details are, well, gory -- it uses IBM's TSpaces project, an implementation of Gelertner's tuplespaces idea in Java, and all like that -- but the basic message is fascinating: as we start working with the blowback of our mediated social interactions moving into real world interaction, the borders between our tools are going to have to be made semi-permeable as well, so they can function as socially as we can.