News Story

The KMi Hexagon room now admits guests.

Peter Scott, Wednesday 16 Mar 2005

Our policy for the use of the KMi Hexagon room is that it is a *Private*, *Working* room only accessible by members of KMi. All members of KMi have an account, can get a camera, and can join this working space to share presence and lightweight working interactions. (If you are not in there just yet, talk to Lewis, Jon or Kevin!)

This policy has excluded us from inviting in anyone who is not a member of our community, even on a temporary basis. And we have lots of other rooms where users can interact with guests. However, this policy has now changed.

The KMi Hexagon room now admits guests. {This change will be under constant review}.

Our intent is that casual drop-in folk interested in the technology can use our Hexagon *demo* room. BUT folk we want to talk to us (as KMi) can now come into the KMi Hexagon for a chat. Feel free to invite them. We still have other rooms eg. http://hexagon.open.ac.uk/lounge/ to take guests who we need to have a longer interaction with, but it is handy to have the come into the main room, if only to see *who we are* and then *go off to the lounge* say; or join a FlashMeeting for a longer interaction. {Note to new folks: you all automagically have FlashMeeting accounts too!}

Notes:

1. Guest access is experimental and may be withdrawn, if we find we have guests bugging us;
or current users have other concerns!
2. We do not, at this stage, have plans to publish the URL; so in the first instance the only guests would be folks we mail it to.
It will inevitably, get out into our world – and we will have to review this policy.
3. We restrict guests to a short interaction time (eg. currently this is set to 30 mins).
This can be changed.
4. Hexagon guests cannot INITIATE a voice chat (but can receive an invite from a registered user).
5. Guests cannot send a text message to the room, only to individuals.
6. Guests cannot see the Reg Users screen, and thereby the History of use or HexMail features.
7. If we find persistent guests bugging us, we will figure out how to block them.
Do-not-distrurb is a current and useful feature, but does not (currently) distinguish by identity.

I hope that KMi users will welcome this minor 😉 change, play with it, and give us feedback.