Collaborative Web-based Development of an Electronic Meeting Agenda using Secretarius Moderation

Traditional, formal, face-to-face meetings are heavily reliant on documents for their conduct. One of the most prominent and important documents is the agenda. The agenda is vital for structuring and driving meeting discussion. The development of the agenda relies on contributions of items for discussion from meeting participants before the meeting. The secretary considers these items for their relevance and potential to achieve the meeting goal. A formal, electronic meeting, being a computer-supported equivalent of a traditional meeting, is also dependent on a useful and effective agenda for its success. This research article presents Logan, a Web Electronic Meeting Document Manager (WEMDM), that provides a novel, hypermedia-based technique for supporting the above agenda development process. Logan allows asynchronous, collaborative development of a meeting agenda. High participant involvement is supported through item contribution and secretarius moderation of contributions. Through a contribution rejection system, moderation supports selection of appropriate contributions for the agenda. Participants are helped in contributing relevant agenda items or prevented from contributing one similar to those in the current agenda via rejected contributions. The process allows flexibility in agenda development as the process may involve one or more iterations. The agenda development process is covered by displaying the interworking of participant agenda development pages. The many Web user interfaces used by the secretarius and other participants in agenda development are shown and described.