Creating something from nothing: a scientific approach to developing group support technology meeting structure

Developing meaningful and productive sessions using group support technology constitutes new challenges for meeting conveners, facilitators and support staff. The complexity of planning for various activities, such as abstract thinking activities, distributed meetings or group writing projects to be conducted in electronic meetings, suggests the need for basic steps and an overall architecture to separate the known structural requirements from the area of needed creativity. To create “something from nothing” in areas not yet documented motivated the author to develop a methodology that could produce the desired results and could be reused. This paper presents the development and application of a methodology for creating a group support technology meeting structure which has defined steps and is repeatable