Meeting Essence II: Capturing the important moments of a meeting

Meetings, and the information exchange during, are gaining ever-greater importance in a world where the more and more emphasis is put on teamwork. Yet the current solution: note taking with pen/paper, is found to be unsatisfactory due to its effort intensiveness yet being error prone and incomplete [1]. Many other solutions have also been proposed, but all suffer from drawbacks that inhibit the widespread adoption of those technologies. We present Meeting EssenceII, a mobile phone based meeting information capture system that utilizes the built in touch screen and recording ability of today's smart phones. In addition, with the one screen, one click system, we introduce a new social interaction centric recording paradigm where only moments deemed important by meeting participants are recorded, and users get to choose when and who to record by clicking on the name of the person that they want to record on a mobile phone screen. The mobile phone front end is implemented with Objective C on Apple iPod Touch 2nd Generation. The server back end consists of 2 servers, a Ruby on Rails server, which is the focal point of the system responsible for both displaying meeting related contextual information and receiving and acting on the user's requests to record, and an Apache/PHP server, which is responsible for handling the upload and download of audio files. A pilot experiment was conducted on the Silicon Valley student body, where a group of experiment subjects were asked to conduct a meeting, and asked to reconstruct what happened during the meeting one week later. The reconstruction results showed that on average, every 4 audio snippets would increase the team's reconstruction score by 1%.