Handheld CSCW in the Meeting Environment

This paper discusses the role of PDA in the meeting environment. Three fundamental design issues are raised: PDA as mobile devices, CSCW devices and coordination devices. The research work described in this paper is focused on the coordination facet. The paper proposes three levels of detail to characterize meetings as coordination mechanisms and ascertain the role of PDA in that process. The first level identifies meeting agents and roles, as well as the tangible things necessary to support those roles. The second level describes how the tangible things are organized in meetings, highlighting repetitive patterns in meeting processes. Finally, the third level draws the functional requirements of the PDA support to the tangible things. The paper applies the proposed approach to a specific meeting environment, staff briefings, and uses a small consulting company as test bed. The PDA functionality was specified from analyzing how the test bed organization conducted staff briefings. A prototype was then developed. The test bed organization also produced feedback information on the prototype use. The obtained results indicate a general satisfaction with the functionality and increased enthusiasm with PDA usage in the meeting environment.