Graphing Meeting Records - An Approach to Visualize Information in a Multi Meeting Context

Abstract

Meeting notes are effective records for participants and a source of information for members who were unable to attend. They act as a reference point to decisions made, to plan next steps, and to identify and track action items. Despite the need for a multi meeting solution (Tucker and Whittaker, 05), meetings are often displayed as separated as well as descriptive documents. The aim of this work is to enhance access to overlapping meeting contents and existing coherences beyond a decoupled description. A visual representation of meeting content can lead to meeting records which are more comprehensible and more time efficient. Furthermore, it enables the depiction of knowledge that is often lost in conventional meeting records. Approach – Our goal was to define a general structure for meeting items, integrating content categories and relations between successive meetings. In this paper, we present a model based approach to visualize meeting content as well as content relations in order to support the preparation, execution and follow-up of meetings. Due to the fact that contents of consecutive meetings refer to each other (Post et al., 04), we consider meetings as a series of events. The resulting model substantiates the transformation of content as well as content relations into a visual form. Value – The proposed solution focuses on the model that is integrated into an interactive visualization. Thus, a novel approach to explore meeting records is provided. The model was proved to be suitable for meeting contents in various use cases. Examining the content in its visual representation across multiple consecutive meetings enhances the identification of any linked information at a glance over even long periods of time. Hence, important pieces of information will not be disregarded. Practical implications – The approach of our multi meeting protocol application is realized as a browser-based implementation that displays data from JSON objects. With this interactive visualization, the user can browse, search, and filter meeting content and get a deeper understanding of topics, their life cycle and relations to other topics. This leads to an overall comprehension of project or business progression that highlights topics that need to be addressed. Thus, the viewer is supported in preparing, executing, and following up meetings successfully and qualified to structure records in order to keep a clean transcript of a meeting.