Automated facilitation of electronic meetings

Much group support system (GSS) research has focused on the impact of group size, leadership, tasks, and other variables on the effectiveness and efficiency of meetings, but few studies have investigated the effect of different facilitation modes. An automated facilitator could assist or possibly supplant a human facilitator in complex or geographically distributed meetings. Our study of electronic meetings showed that automated facilitation was as good as expert-human and better than novice-human facilitation for simple idea generation and ranking tasks.