A New Digital Report for Disseminating Meeting Outcomes

This paper explores the “digitalization” of a particular genre of written documents, the ones produced by meeting processes, especially supported by Electronic Meeting Systems. Although it is now common to find meeting reports in a digital format, it was found that they are simply replicas of the paper versions. As long as a purpose of a meeting report is to disseminate meeting outcomes it is important understanding what kind of new digital document must be produced to improve this process. In this paper it is proposed a solution based on the notions of meeting genre and meeting genre system, but extends the last concept to incorporate the context notion. In order to implement the proposed solution, it was analyzed the actual digital meeting reports produced. Then, it was set up an experiment with a small sample of users to understand the impact of the additional characteristics in the dissemination process. 1 Theoretical Background The problem of organizational integration of meeting minutes, in the perspective that is analyzed here, leads to the use of the concept of communication and digital genres. The concept of genre was imported from the literature ([3]), but it was generalized to the organizational context (see, [1]). A genre of organizational communication is an institutionalized communicative action (e.g. memo, report, resume, letter, meeting, announcement, expense form, training seminar). Genres are characterized by their purpose and form. It is important to note that often genres are identified mainly by its form (or structure) and not by its purpose ([6]) Genres may be linked together in a way that constitutes a communicative process. This circumstance creates a genre system, with interdependent genres that are enacted in some typical sequence. Orlikowski and Yates[4] presented such a genre system intended to characterize meetings. According to these researchers, a meeting is a composition of four genres: meeting logistics, meeting agenda, the meeting itself, and the meeting minutes. Others added the context Crowston and William [2] examined 100 web pages with the intention of looking for reproduced and emergent genre. It is in this context that meeting genres are mentioned either by [6] or [7]. But neither one analyzed it in detail. As mentioned by Shepherd & Watters[5], in a perspective of genre development it is important to analyze the evolution of the meeting minute's cybergenre, and the features that are adopted in order to take advantage and reduce the disadvantages of Web technology. 2. Meeting minutes in the Web A general view to the meeting minutes produced by EMS (Electronic Meeting Systems) allowed the identification of some weakness of placing them in the Web without prior adaptation. Typically, reports produced have not a handle structure, especially if they are put in the Internet and are consulted in the digital form. The second aspect is the lack of context of the information presented in those reports. Although, they have some information that corresponds to the presentation of the problem in the meeting, there is a great quantity of contextual information, accessible to the meeting participants, that is lost after the meeting. In order to obtain an answer and incorporating characteristics of other reporting system it was made a survey to meeting minutes placed in the Web and produced by government entities. As it is shown in the summary of the survey (Table 1) almost every meeting minutes corresponded to the script of the meeting. Almost all the reports have agenda, but only one has links between the agenda topics and description of activities performed in the meeting (www.cm.silves.pt). In what concerns the context, there is one example (cm-lisboa.pt).