A Distributed Facilitation Framework

Most meetings are perceived to be extremely unproductive in terms of efficiently utilizing the participants' time and effectively achieving the meeting objectives. Indeed, meetings consume a great deal of time and effort in organizations. These problems occur frequently because effective guidelines or procedures are not used. To overcome these problems, we propose in this paper a framework for distributed facilitation incorporating a model of the decision making processes. In this framework many group facilitation tasks are automated, at least partially to increase the ability of the facilitator to monitor and control the meeting process.