Assisting meeting facilitation through automated analysis of group dynamics

In many group work situations, meetings take up a reasonable amount of time. Several techniques have been introduced to streamline meetings and reach conclusions faster, many of which place an individual in the role of meeting facilitator. Facilitation involves intervening to produce desired results. Thus, a facilitator should be able to identify certain group dynamics and act accordingly. In this paper, we present and electronic idea generation system based on thinkLets dynamics and designed to measure group dynamics. This information is provided to the facilitator so he or she can decide whether or not to intervene.