Tools to Assist Meeting Planning

Meetings take up a large amount of time, especially at the upper managerial levels. To help meetings progress smoothly and reach desired goals, meeting facilitators are frequently called in. Facilitators have at their disposal a number of techniques, including thinkLets. Through the use of thinkLets, facilitators can plan the meeting beforehand, deciding which activities to perform at each point. However, even with the use of thinkLets, designing a meeting is not an easy task, in particular for novice facilitators. A number of considerations must be made when selecting activities and designing the meeting dynamics. In this paper, the authors discuss this problem and present a framework and a system to assist the design of meetings, electronic or otherwise, using thinkLets and compatibility rules. The framework implements rules to help facilitators select and link thinkLets together in and orderly fashion, designing the meeting in the process.