What are productive uses for a big monitor in a workplace?

We have a large display in our office that we half-jokingly refer to as an "information radiator", which is a term that I believe was coined by Alistair Cockburn in his book "Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology For Small Teams". We have a small team of software developers (currently six), a handful of testers, product managers and project managers who all work in a common space. The information radiator is set to show project status information, such as key statistics from our bug tracker (how many open defects in the current milestone release, how many to verify, how many regressions, etc.), milestone dates (how many days to our next timebox build or beta, release candidate, etc.), a link to a Google Calendar that shows the comings and goings of various team members (since on any given day at least one member of the team will be on holiday or working at home or running an errand that takes them out of the office for hours at a time). One of our project managers also takes it upon himself to build custom infographics that convey useful information, and which rotate every few minutes. He'll typically have three or four up there at any one time. Overall it's proven to be extremely useful, and when I'm wandering to and fro in the office, e.g. going to get a cup of tea, I will always take a quick look at the screen to see what's going on. The value of the display is far greater than the relatively modest effort it involved to get it displaying useful, (more or less) real-time data. Cat videos are good too, though.

I really like a rotating display of information. A Google calendar with team schedules and meetings is a great idea by Dan. Team goals and desired accomplishments is a good idea as well. Extra motivation  and a good reminder. http://accessories.ap.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=au&category_id=4009&cs=audhs1&l=en&s=dhs&mp=www.dell.com.au%2Fhome%2Fmonitors&redirect=2

You may want to check out Screenful, a rotating information radiator  that provides: * Who's working on what * Average Lead/Reaction/Cycle times * Sprint burndown * Release forecast * etc. etc. Find more at Screenful http://screenful.me

I worked in a fast food chain before and we used to have big monitors all over the place, especially in the kitchen. It was used to monitor the employees and basically the food orders from the customers and on how many chickens and burgers that we are going to produce every hour.Bottomline, it was used to monitor productivity in the workplace.