In co-located meetings, participants create and share content to establish a common understanding. In this paper, we present a collaborative environment that enables group members to create and share content simultaneously by providing them with different kinds of individual input devices and a shared workspace. We also report on an exploratory study to investigate the influence of the input device used on the shared knowledge produced by the group. The results suggest that driven by the affordances, various input devices complement each other. We thus recommend groups to be equipped with multitude of them to support diverse meeting task demands. Additionally, we observed that groupware usage differs across various phases of the problem-solving activity. This provides implications for the design of collaborative environments to assist each of the respective phases of the task, in order to extend their usefulness for the group.

We present a longitudinal study on the participation regulation effects in the presence of a speech aware interactive table. This study focuses on training meetings of groups of top level managers, whose compositions do not change, in a corporate organization. We show that an effect of balancing participation develops over time. We also report other emerging group-specific features such as interaction patterns and signatures, leadership effects, and behavioral changes between meetings. Finally we collect feedback from the participants and analyze qualitatively the human and social aspects of the participants interaction mediated by the technology.

We present the results of group dynamics and their effect on success in problem solving/decision making meetings. We use a novel multiple input environment for collaboration and data collection, and a hidden profile task given to groups, whose goals are to find the correct solution. We observe that groups elect 0, 1 or 2 leaders, and the best results are obtained by the groups with a single leader. Prior acquaintance (familiarity), does not show any effect on the success or on the group strategies. Groups with a single leader tend to be more successful, and leaders expressed their authority verbally rather than by through the collaborative system.