An Efficient And Scalable Meeting Minutes Generation And Presentation Technique

G. Salvendy, M.J. Smith (Eds.): Human Interface, Part II, HCII 2011, LNCS 6772, pp. 345–352, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
An Efficient and Scalable Meeting Minutes
Generation and Presentation Technique
Berk Taner, Can Yildizli, Ahmet Ozcan Nergiz, and Selim Balcisoy
Sabanci University, Tuzla, Istanbul, Turkey
{berktaner,canyildizli,ahmetn,balcisoy}@sabanciuniv.edu
Abstract. Meetings are essential for a group of individuals to work together.
An important output of meetings is minutes. Taking and distributing minutes is
a time consuming task. Also, any new member of a meeting series will not be
able to easily refer to old minutes if they are in written or e-mail format. Our
contribution to this problem is to propose a new approach for taking meeting
minutes that will allow dynamic and cooperative note taking. In addition,
resulting minutes will allow any new participant to spend a smaller integration
time.
Keywords: dynamic meeting minutes, storytelling interfaces.
1 Introduction
Meetings are essential for a group of individuals to work together. They are a
platform, where ideas are transferred and debated on. Techniques to make meetings
more efficient are constantly researched and different technologies for telepresence
and integrated workspace are developed.
An important output of meetings is minutes. Minutes should be taken by one
person and should be distributed to and approved by every participant. Its content is
generally under discretion of minute taker. After minutes are compiled, it should be
distributed to and approved by participants of the meeting. This whole process takes
up time lowering utilization. In addition, the content of minutes does not always help
capture the process of decision-making. This creates another problem: Any new
participant and any absent participant over a series of meetings will not be able to
fully grasp the content of previous meetings.
In order to address these issues we’ve proposed and interactive note taking
medium. This medium allows tracking authors of ideas as well as taking snapshots of
the medium in order create visual meeting minutes dynamically. With this approach,
minute takers will spend less time and resulting minutes can be approved in much less
time. Its visual nature allows any newcomer to the group to grasp the concepts and
see the evolving of ideas from the beginning.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is about related work in the
field, Section 3 is about our approach to the problem, Section 4 is about usability
studies and Section 5 contains results and discussion.

346 B. Taner et al.
2 Approach
In order to prove proposed approach, web based software is developed and used in
usability studies. The task was designed to allow us to compare timings between two
experiments - one using developed software and one using classical whiteboard and
note-taking approach.
Fig. 1. Blank GUI, at the start of a meeting series
For the usability studies we limited number of participants to four, denoted by four
different colors. Participants can either draw or enter text to the medium. There are
two parts: One part is dynamic area that is cleaned at the start of each meeting; the
other part is static area which contains time stamped snapshots of the medium. Static
area is persistent throughout a series of meetings, acting as a constant reminder and
visual minutes of previous meetings.
Capturing important information in static area helps to capture state of a meeting
when the snapshot is taken. This allows all participants to follow through the
evolution of an idea. It will also show links between ideas and how a meeting is
played out in the end. This is significant with respect to traditional minutes, since it
only contains the final decision and actions. This way if snapshots are taken regularly,
another person can reconstruct the progress in the meeting just by looking at the

An Efficient and Scalable Meeting Minutes Generation and Presentation Technique 347
snapshots. This feature is especially beneficial to any new participant in a series, as
can be seen from our usability study.
Fig. 2. Screen shot of medium during a study session
Another benefit of this approach is persistance of important information. If a
project spans thorough a long time interval; some ideas and information will be
forgotten and lost in the meeting minutes. It is a common practice to make an list of
important ideas and go through them regularly. With this approach, every important
information can be marked dynamically and will be present at the static part of the
medium in a reminding but unobstrusive manner.
Last benefit of our approach is on dynamic creation of meeting minutes. For
traditional text based approach, one participant must take notes and get approval from
involved parties. This also gives an implied authority over minutes to minute taker.
Minute taker may take concious or unconcious liberties with minute content, which
would lead approval problems and lost time for a business. In our approach, all
participants take part in note creation and everybody can see the visual notes before
leaving the room and approve it for distribution. This way, there will be less
communication and effort spent on approving a meeting minute.

348 B. Taner et al.
3 Related Work
Although they are so important and serve as a common practice for discussing things
among people, meetings currently are not considered as adequate as they are expected
to be. The estimations regarding the meeting productivity by different types of
managers give a range between %33‐%47 [11].
One of the main reasons for this inefficiency is information loss, i.e. the failure to
record important information, decisions and actions and how this affects future
actions [4]. Thus, capturing information during the meetings becomes a crucial
practice which has to be done efficiently to prevent loss. Conventional method for this
practice is note taking which is done manually either by a person responsible for that
or by everybody individually. However this is not an easy process and studies show
that people are experiencing problems such as failure to note facts which turn out to
be vital later, insufficiency of notes since there is not enough time to write everything,
reduced ability to participate and difficulties to pay close attention [5, 12, 13, 14].
The predominant tools for note taking used today are pen, paper, whiteboards and
laptops (for private note taking) [4], there is an interest in more powerful capture tools
[3,13,15,16,17] that will enhance the capturing process by making it automated,
creating environments which can capture utilizing more than one media (i.e. audio,
video, text) and which can link them to each other contextually or depending on time.
Systems that include all or part of these capturing abilities together are mainly
called as smart meeting systems. They are also able to serve as incorporated to shared
workspaces [6] that improve the group interaction process and facilitate the
collaborative work within the group providing an environment to share information
among the members. Moreover, since face‐to-face meetings are time consuming and
there are distributed working groups in which people are not able to gather physically,
internet is used by these systems to make the groups virtually collocated. There are
many smart systems developed recently by researchers [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25].
Yu et al. [10] proposed a three layered generic architecture to model a smart
meeting system. These layers are meeting capturing, meeting recognition and
semantic processing. The first one is the physical level that includes the capturing
environment, devices and methods. The second one serves as the structural level
which is responsible for the low‐level analyzing of the recorded media content. The
last one handles the high level manipulations on the semantics such as meeting
annotation, indexing and browsing. This structure is based on the system requirements
which can be listed as multimodal sensing, multimodal recognition, semantic
representation and interactive user interface.
4 Usability Study
The task was to discuss and debate on a given problem. The groups are told to come
to a conclusion after doing two sessions. Each meeting was limited to 25 minutes. We
had 10 participants divided into two subgroups of 5. Both groups consisted of
graduate students of different universities.
We had two different tasks for the subgroups. Task 1 was to determine whether
there should be a final exam or term project for the graduate courses. Task 2 was to

determine whether migration from old software to new software should take place or
not.
The groups are constructed as such that two participants are in favor of the idea
and the other are in opposition. Replace member is selected from the opposition group
since opposing an idea requires more background knowledge about the topic. This
was we were able to observe if a newcomer with no-prior knowledge is able to
integrate into the debate and make contributions to the debate.
One group was taken in a room where a classical whiteboard and a controller
present to help with minute taking and compiling process. The controller did not take
part in the debate, but tried to compile as much information as possible into a meeting
minute. The other group was taken in a room, same as described above, with addition
of a projector to allow participants to use developed software to create minutes on the
fly. Web based software was operated by a controller based on directives from
experiment group.
The experiment starts with 4 participants from a subgroup is taken into test room
and given Task 1. After 25 minutes of discussion and debate; the meeting adjourns.
At the end of the meeting, controller passes minutes to all participants and gets
approval before meeting 2. In parallel, the other subgroup is taken into another test
room and given Task 2. After 25 minutes of discussion and dynamic note taking using
developed software, the meeting is adjourned. Since notes are dynamically created
and projected on the wall; all participants approved generated notes quickly before
leaving the room.
Fig. 3. Meeting setting and integration time for two different groups. After meeting 1,
participant number 4 is replaced with participant number 5 in both groups. One of the aims was
to measure how quickly participant 5 is integrated into the discussion. In group1 (traditional
approach) this time is 15 minutes, in group 2 (our approach) this time is reduced to 2 minutes.

350 B. Taner et al.
Second round of sessions are done the next day to simulate time gap between
meetings. In second round one participant from each subgroup is removed and
another participant without prior knowledge of the task is added (Fig 3). No
communication between replaced participant and newcomer is allowed during time
gap between meetings. In one group the newcomer is given printed meeting minutes
and spent 15 minutes in the beginning by reading and grasping the discussion from
previous session. The other new participant supplied with dynamically created
minutes projected on the board using developed software. It took only 2 minutes
before he stated that he was ready to proceed.
5 Results and Discussion
This data supports our two claims: In the traditional minute taking approach the
minute taker; in this case controller has to pass meeting minutes to each participant
and get approval. Since participants do not see minutes until they are written down,
they treat it as new content and have to read it from the beginning. With the
interactive whiteboard approach, minutes are created by all participants during the
meeting, and visible throughout the meeting; so approval process takes little amount
of time.
Any newcomer to a meeting must spend some time to review previous meetings
notes and process the information. We call this time, “integration time”. In the traditional
minute taking approach, any newcomer is presented with a stack of paper or e-mails to
read before attending the meeting. In our usability study, traditional method produced 3
A4 papers of minutes. Even with this small size of minutes, the newcomer’s integration
time was 15 minutes. With the whiteboard approach, the newcomer is only presented
with the time stamped information on the static area. The integration took only 2 minutes
before the newcomer said the meeting can begin. This shows a significant improvement
over traditional approach.
Our study shows that dynamically created visual meeting notes are beneficial in
above mentioned aspects.
6 Future Work
We used web based software to test our approach. One major limitation of this
software is the assumption that participants are present in the same room. The
software only provides a digital medium where participants can describe ideas. In
order to test this approach in a more complex environment, software that supports
visual and audio communication is needed. This way, participants can be distributed
to remote locations and a series of meetings can be conducted using this new software
and timings can be analyzed. Physical presence is an important aspect of
communication and testing our approach with telepresence would be an interesting
challenge.

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