Genre analysis is an approach to study organizational structures, focusing on communication patterns, which can be applied to the specific context of meetings. This research investigates the impact of genre analysis on the design of meetingware. The paper describes how genre analysis was used to develop meetingware for several organizations and meeting genres. The paper covers the whole design process, from genre elicitation to validation. The obtained results indicate that genre analysis impacts meetingware design in five major dimensions: organizational integration, situated nature, meeting lifecycle view, focus on communication patterns, and preservation of the meeting context.

Abstract: This paper explores the digitalization of a particular genre of written documents, the ones produced by meeting processes, especially supported by Electronic Meeting Systems. Although it is now common to find meeting reports in a digital format, it was found that they are simply replicas of the paper versions. As long as a purpose of a meeting report is to disseminate meeting outcomes it is important understanding what kind of new digital document must be produced to improve this process. In this paper it is proposed a solution based on the notions of meeting genre and meeting genre system, but extends the last concept to incorporate the context notion. In order to implement the proposed solution, it was analyzed the actual digital meeting reports produced. Then, it was set up an experiment with a small sample of users to understand the impact of the additional characteristics in the dissemination process.