Towards a Framework for Supporting Professional Teamwork: Modelling Human Actions in Small Group Meetings

Research into computer support for colocated small group meetings has not delivered any significant benefit in spite of significant investment and decades of research. We suggest that the focus has been on the wrong problem. Each time a process is enacted in small group work it will different (even if only slightly different) due to the situational context. Therefore the process for supporting the process should also be different each time and prescriptive, systematised support will be of little value in this situation. We propose that the processes must be exposed and identified dynamically so that useful support can be provided when it is required and one of the first steps is to understand what people are doing in these processes. The main contribution of this paper is a framework for helping researchers to understand the problem before considering a solution.