Pics of Jen

Pic of me and Jen on July 4th.

Pic of Jen after getting her hair done by her friend Rosemary.

Web Cam My Whiteboard

In the software field (as well as others I'm sure) a lot of creative work gets done on office whiteboards. There are a variety of commonly used, but generally bad, ways to persist all of this work into an artifact:

• Memorization (Not permanent.)
• Pen and paper (Who copied our whiteboard design down yesterday? Didn't John already do it?)
• Whiteboard with built-in scanner technology (Too expensive.)
• Use a digi-cam or cellphone to snap a picture (Infrequent and it's hard to find who has the pictures, especially months later.)

There are also more advanced, i.e. overly complicated, solutions like Microsoft's real-time capture research.

Here's my idea. I'm sure others have thought of this too. I'm not claiming to be the first. I haven't done it myself, but it would be fairly simple to do:

1. Buy a cheap web cam. It doesn't need good ratings on video capture, just the ability to perform moderate to hi-res still picture capture.
2. Mount it on the ceiling a few feet away from the whiteboard.
3. Use a USB over Ethernet extender to run the USB cable back to a computer, preferably a departmental web server, where the web cam software will be installed.
   
4. Automate the cam to take a picture once or twice every day. Once at noon and once at the end of the work day would be plenty for 99% of the whiteboard work out there.
   
5. Copy the pictures into a website folder giving each of them a unique filename using a timestamp. (Microsoft Windows users could potentially use the "Web Sharing" folder option.)
6. Automate or evenly manually archive them periordically by year and month.

Yes, all the pictures would come out tilted, since the web cam would be shooting down at an angle, but the most important thing is that all the information would be saved off (assuming the web cam has enough depth-of-field). You could zoom in and pan around to find what you need.

By automating the setup you don't have to worry about the cleaning crew cleaning the whiteboard at random intervals. You also don't have to wait until you fill the whiteboard with something "really important" before taking a picture with a digi-cam or cell phone. If all the pics are on a publicized intranet site then everyone in the department knows how to get to them, even after you realize, "Oh yeah, that was important wasn't it! Did anyone copy it down before the whiteboard was erased?"

The next step would be to add a button to the intranet web page allowing anyone to snap a picture of the whiteboard at that instance. So if you and a colleague are about to erase the whiteboard to do some designs, but someone else has already left some important looking stuff on it, you can snap a pic first before erasing it just in case.

Like I said, I haven't done this myself yet, but if you decide to please (1) email me your comments and how it worked out for you and (2) paypal me $20!