On the design of Group Decision Processes for Electronic Meeting Rooms

This paper reports a set of experiments motivated by the observation that the design of group decision processes is crucial to the success of electronic meeting room usage. Decision processes can be designed with more emphasis either on exchanging meanings (discussing issues) or exchanging artefacts (generating and structuring topics). Our problem is that, given a particular case to be discussed in an electronic meeting room, we do not know how to design the meeting for best performance. The paper builds a framework for studying this problem based on the notion of communication mode. The experiments already made confirm that quality of results varies when different communication modes are used and show that meetings that do not exchange meanings result in solutions with inferior quality.