We begin with a number of assumptions about the sort of meeting that we are to support:
It is also assumed that the Chair is running an I-X Process Panel, which provides support for the meeting and, moreover, that the I-X system has been configured and is running as recommended, as have the contents of the I-Room.
Below we discuss:
With the I-X components running, and the I-Room Helper Robot activated, and the participants' avatars in the I-Room in Second Life (and all streaming media, if in the course of the meeting screens will be used to show images), the meeting can begin. As well as using the functionality offered within Second Life by the Helper Robot, the Chair will control the meeting using the functionality offered by the I-X Chair Process Panel and its underlying domain models, and the additional I-X tools (accessed through the Tools menu of the panel). In particular, the I-Room Tool will be used to interact with the I-X Helper Robot in the I-Room.
Before starting the meeting the Chair should add a new activity hold-meeting <meeting-name> (with a suitable identifier supplied as the name of the meeting) to his/her panel, using the New > New Activity menu option. The Action menu of this activity on the panel should include the option Refine using hold-meeting. Selecting this option causes the high-level meeting process to be loaded onto the panel, which should now appear as shown below (with TEST_MEET here used for the name of the meeting).
The task of the Chair is twofold:
More specifically, there are four different actions open to the Chair, corresponding to those which usually occur during formal meetings, which generate information that contributes to the record of the meeting:
The chair can perform these actions either by chatting to the Helper Robot directly in Second Life (on channel 9, if the default is used), or else by using the I-Room Tool menus. (Note that the Chair might be happy to delegate some or all of this task of documenting the meeting to one of the other participating avatars, who can do this by interacting directly with the Helper Robot.) For the minutes of the meeting to be correctly constructed, these actions should be performed at the appropriate time during the meeting. In other words, minutes should be taken as the discussion proceeds, action items should be noted when they arise, and so on - just as they would in a conventional meeting.
The Chair can now start the meeting by performing the first activity on his/her panel, start-meeting TEST_MEET. The Action menu for this item offers, among other things, three actions that are potentially relevant:
The panel now appears as shown below, with four additional sub-activities now included below the start-meeting activity. This indicates that, for our structured meeting, the sub-tasks of welcoming the participants, noting apologies, agreeing a time for the end of the meeting, and approving the minutes of the previous meeting should all be addressed before we can consider the start-meeting activity to have been completed.
Accordingly, the Chair now switches his attention to the meeting participants in the I-Room, and moves through these sub-activities, ticking off each as Done in turn, and all the while documenting the discussion by minuting apologies, errors noticed in the previous minutes and so on. (These records appear in the panel under a Note other reports activity; right-clicking on this activity and selecting Show Details allows the contents of the records to be viewed at any time.)
After the start-meeting activity has been completed, the next activity is address-action-items TEST_MEET. Among the options in the Action menu for this activity is Refine using address-action-items. Selecting this option adds further sub-activities to the panel as shown below.
The activity at this stage of the meeting is to review outstanding actions that were placed on participants during previous meetings. Selecting the address-action-items refinement for the activity loads a series of discuss-action sub-activities, one for each of the currently outstanding actions (and note that these activities also contain the name of the actioned avatar). The Chair should now address each of these sub-activities in turn, discussing the status and results of the named actions with the meeting participants. The Action menu for each sub-activity contains the option Carry to next meeting. The Chair should select this option if the action in question has not been completed (or its status is not known); otherwise, he/she should select Done once the results of the action have been documented (or N/A if circumstances dictate that the action should be deprecated).
Note that the address-action-items refinement is defined in the file domain-library/meeting-agenda.lsp. As we shall see, the individual sub-activities comprising this refinement will later be automatically replaced with the descriptions of the actions carried forward plus those of any new actions that arise during the course of this meeting, to form the appropriate set to discuss at the next meeting in this series. Furthermore, since meeting-agenda.lsp is a text file, it can be modified or augmented by hand to accommodate any changes that arise between the end of this and the time of the next meeting.
The next activity in the meeting is to discuss the agenda items that are specific to this particular meeting; accordingly, the next activity in the top-level meeting process is address-agenda-items TEST_MEET, for which the menu presents the option Refine using address-agenda-items. After selecting this, the Chair's panel now appears as shown below.
Each of these discuss sub-activities can be handled in the same manner as the discuss-action activities, namely, they can be marked as Done, as N/A, or they can be carried forward to the next meeting. The address-agenda-items refinement is also defined in the file domain-library/meeting-agenda.lsp, where it can be modified prior to the meeting, and, as with action items, this refinement will be modified automatically at the end of the current meeting to include both those agenda items that are carried forward from this meeting and those new items that arise during the discussion.
It is particularly during the discussion of the various agenda items that one might expect use to be made of the display screens in the I-Room to share visual information with the other participants. The Image Viewer Tool and the matrix build and display functions of the I-Room Tool help the Chair to control the display of images in the I-Room.
After the specific action and agenda items have been discussed and handled appropriately, the next activity is to discuss-any-other-business TEST_MEET. Once this has been Done, the next activity is to finish_meeting TEST_MEET. There is an option Refine using finish-meeting available to perform this activity; selecting this introduces two sub-activities. The first is to establish date-next-meeting; once a decision has been made and this has been marked Done, the second sub-activity is to formally close-meeting. After having Done this, the Chair's panel should appear as shown below.
While strictly not part of the meeting proper, there is one final activity left in the meeting process for the Chair to perform: setup-next-meeting. For this task the Action menu presents the option Set up for the next meeting. Selecting this option does two things:
A technical note here describes the Setup-next-meeting handler and the representations it uses in more detail.