AgendaBuilder: A system to support meeting design

Meetings take a large amount of time, and frequently, meeting facilitators are called in to help steer the meeting in the right direction. Unfortunately, facilitation is still something of an art. To assist facilitators, the thinkLet technique has been proposed. Through the use of thinkLets, facilitators may plan the meeting beforehand, deciding which activities to perform at each point. However, designing a meeting is not an easy task, especially for novice facilitators. In this paper we present AgendBuilder, a system to assist the design of meetings, electronic or otherwise, using thinkLets and compatibility rules. The system helps facilitators select and link thinkLets together in and orderly fashion, designing the meeting in the process.