Distributed facilitation: a concept whose time has come?

Group facilitation is a dynamic process that involves managing relationships between people, tasks and technology, as well as structuring tasks and contributing to the effective accomplishment of the meetings outcomes. This is a difficult problem that becomes even more difficult as group work is geographically distributed. This paper provides a comprehensive framework, in the form of a meeting model, that defines the many activities that surround group work. We show that in existing systems support for facilitation is low and based on the level of facilitator control, we identify facilitation functions and suggest a rational for prioritizing them. With this in hand, we are designing and implementing a prototype facilitation system to support group activities in a distributed environment.

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