System Presence Integration Idea

[Chris Warburton]

With the increased momentum towards unified messaging and presence
systems (ie. Telepathy and things built on top such as Decibel) I think
there needs to be some thought put into the use of presence by the
system. That is, if the system can see the user's various presence
attributes then it can infer actions to take (locking screen when "Away"
for example), and likewise the user's actions can infer their presence
("Away" when screen locked). If integrated throughout the stack then
this could be a very powerful, and as far as I know unique to Free
Software, feature.

To me such an idea would take 3 stages to implement:

1) Discussion and brainstorming of possible use cases throughout the
system

2) Building the infrastructure needed to enable such cases (Dbus as far
as I can tell)

3) Creation/modification of interfaces for users to control them

I have written a spec[1] and blueprint[2] for stage 1, the discussion,
which I think needs to be had (even if it results in rejection of the
idea) and was wondering what people thought. I have also added it to the
Ubuntu Brainstorm[3].

Thanks,
Chris Warburton

1 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemPresenceIntegrationSpec

2
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/system-presence-integration

3 http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1650/