Tivoli: an electronic whiteboard for informal workgroup meetings

This paper describes Tivoli, an electronic whiteboard application designed to support informal workgroup meetings and targeted to run on the Xerox Liveboard, a large screen, pen-based interactive display. Tivoli strives to provide its users with the simplicity, facile use, and easily understood functionality of conventional whiteboards, while at the same time taking advantage of the computational power of the Liveboard to support and augment its users' informal meeting practices. The paper presents the motivations for the design of Tivoli and briefly describes the current version in operation. It then reflects on several issues encountered in designing Tivoli, including the need to reconsider the basic assumptions behind the standard desktop GUI, the use of strokes as the fundamental object in the system, the generalized wipe interface technique, and the use of meta-strokes as gestural commands.