Phone conferences get graphic with the Meet me on the Web! Teleconferencing service from PGC.
Meeting Pages are live visual summaries of meetings. They are generated in real-time by a telefacilitator who attends the meeting by phone.
The telefacilitator carefully follows the course of the meeting, records it on the Meeting Page, and writes it out at very short time intervals as a live Web page. Participants then simply hit "reload" to see an up-to-the-minute version. As an ongoing real-time record of the meeting, the Meeting Page provides a common frame of reference for all group members, both face-to-face and distributed, improving communication by enabling everyone to "be on the same page."
When the ideas meet the pixels,
working meetings become Web pages.
Live Meeting Pages are a service of the Performing Graphics Company. The leader of the meeting from your organization can concentrate on running the discussion. The visual telefacilitator from PGC captures the group's ideas in real-time text and graphics on the Meeting Page. The group can see the page being made, offering suggestions and corrections. And the final graphic image is available in hardcopy and many visual data formats in addition to Web pages, for use as is or to be modified by further computer editing.
Please see that the final result, as captured in the various formats, has already been organized by the group -- it is not just a linear record, but a collaborative map of the meeting. Also be clear that a map is not "minutes" of a meeting; it is not an exhaustive transcript but instead a graphical summary, designed for rapid scanning on the fly so that it can be used for orientation by group members while the meeting is actually taking place.
In the Meet me on the Web! Teleconferencing system, live Meeting Pages provide a telegroup with a framework for communication. The text and graphics in the page establish a context for the details of the meeting, freeing up the audio (or audio/video) channel for live discussion. Then during the conversation group members can refer to particular parts of the evolving text-graphic record which is in common view, so that the Meeting Page functions as an "explicit group memory."
To see a Meeting Page, click here. This page is from a neighborhood discussion which took place on community access cable television in Palo Alto. The page is in PGC's "Spatial Text" style, which uses 2D text to combine rich portrayal of meeting content and speedy access via modem for neighborhood residents. The spatial text layout includes embedded drawings (for viewers who have graphics turned on). There is also a fully graphical version of the Meeting Page which takes a little longer to transmit. And finally there is a PostScript version for printing, and for browsers that can view that format.
This brief description of the Meet me on the Web! Teleconferencing system raises some questions. Where will the Meeting Pages be? Who can see them? What exactly is on a Meeting Page? Is it like minutes? Who will run the meeting? Can we learn to do telefacilitation ourselves?* Answers to these and many other technical questions can be found in the Q&A section on the next page.
* Yes; we'd be glad to teach you how. Look at the page describing our Telefacilitation Training.
The Performing Graphics Company has over 10 years experience in computer graphic recording and group facilitation. We use our own Webmacs software especially designed for graphic recording. We can do meeting recording in person, running on a high resolution 1024x768 projection display at your organization's site, or remotely via phone or other telemedia.
Next page
Return to PGC home page
(C) Copyright 1995 PGC
Note: "Performing Graphics," "Meeting Maps," "Meeting Pages," "Visual TeleFacilitation," and "Meet me on the Web!" are trademarks of the Performing Graphics Company.