Does our basic assumption actually hold?

As Annika wrote a couple of days ago, the basic assumption for context-based information management is something like this:

People recall information more accurately and/or more easily when they have access to some information about the context in which they encountered the information.

But is that actually true? Annika and I will be at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2006 (Oct 4-7, San Diego, CA, US). There will be over 1200 participants at the conference — definitely a good place to get to know lots of people. So we’ve decided to play guinea pigs at the GHC’06 (the more official way of putting this is: “to follow an approach inspired by Action Research“).

At the conference, we’ll try to collect as much context data as possible. After the conference, we’ll then look at how much the context data actually helps us in remembering who we met there, what we talked about, which presentations about which topics we attended, and so on.

So far, what we’ll do is this:

• Take notes who we’re talking to at the conference, where we are during the conversation, and what the conversation is about.
• Try to get as many people as possible to enable Bluetooth and discoverable mode in their mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs, laptops) and do Bluetooth scans. That way, we can see which devices are close to us.
• Ask people to give their contact data and permission to link the contact data with the Bluetooth IDs of the devices they identify as theirs.

In addition to that, we’ll try to get GPS traces whenever we walk around outside the conference hotel. We’ll also make sure the internal clocks of our cameras are synchronised to the device doing the GPS capturing, so that we’ll later be able to add geodata to the pictures. We’ll bring a compass so that we can note orientation information for the pictures we take.