Information needs for meeting facilitation

Abstract

In many group work settings, meetings take up a reasonable amount of time and often do not achieve satisfactory outcomes. One of the techniques that has been introduced to ensure meetings run smoothly and reach their goals places an individual in the role of meeting facilitator. Facilitation involves putting together the meeting agenda, designing meeting dynamics and overseeing the meeting at run time, to ensure goals are met. This may involve intervening or adjusting meeting structure to produce desired results. Thus, a facilitator should be able to act according to perceived group dynamics or problems. In this paper, we investigate information needs during facilitation activities. Our goal is to be able to construct systems that provide information to the facilitator so he or she can decide when to act and what to do. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.