This project addresses some of the needs of teams that are partially collocated, i.e. all teammates' offices are clustered together on the same floor, except for one person that's located at a different site, maybe in another building on the same campus or maybe on another continent. We call these teams "hub-and-satellite." It's often difficult for that satellite person to participate fully in meetings, they're often left out of the impromptu hallway conversations, and they don't have the benefits of overhearing what others are talking about. In short, they're out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

To combat these problems we've developed a device, which we call an Embodied Social Proxy, or ESP for short. It's just a computer on a cart in the hub team space, but it has a specific purpose: to always represent the satellite person. It has two modes of operation - in meetings it acts as a videoconferencing terminal; between meetings it shows information about the satellite person's availability. (See Appendix A below for details.)

We started this project by living it, as we are a hub-and-satellite team.  We are deploying multiple ESP units to other teams and studying their use.

See this MSR feature article about ESP for more information.  Here is an ESP in use:

This is the remote's view: