Visualizing the Decision-Making Process in a Face-to-Face Meeting

The decision making process is usually one of the most critical elements of any face-to-face meeting. Participants in a group meeting follow certain procedures and guidelines for facilitating the decision making process. These include such rules as turn taking, not interrupting the consultation, and keeping suggestions or ideas clear and concise. The ultimate objective of such meetings is to arrive at decisions in a timely manner by having a diversity of opinions from as many participants as possible. We postulate that by visualizing the group dynamics during a face-to-face meeting, administrators might be able to get a better handle on the strengths and weaknesses of the group's consultation process. The end result would be to improve the overall quality of meetings. We present a visualization tool that captures and reveals the ongoing social dynamics during the decision-making process within a face-to-face and real-time meeting. Our system captures the required data through a simple and easy-to-use interface and then visualizes the outcome of the meeting.