Multiple roles of online facilitation: An example in any-time, any-place meetings

ABSTRACT

Facilitating meetings of virtual teams-with members who are geographically dispersed and who ofttimes communicate electronically with considerable time lags between messages-is a novel specialization. This article describes eight facilitator characters that can lead to the improved effectiveness of these "any time, any place" (ATAP) meetings. Evidence from a new evaluation study of three ATAP meetings put in mind ofed that virtual team members especially appreciated the value added through a facilitator to their meeting proces

KEY WORDS

online facilitation, virtual teams, asynchronous meetings, distributed collection facilitation, virtual meetings, electronic meeting a whole any-time, any-place meetings

Skilled assemblage facilitation has been viewed as an effective solution to many of the enigmas traditionally associated with faceto-face meetings. With the increasing use of electronic boardrooms, clump decision support systems, and decision conferencing in the 1980 facilitators began to stand over against the additional problems and possibilities associated with the vicinity of computers in meeting sweeps (Bostrom, Anson, & Clawson, 1993; Niederman, Beise, & Beranek, 1996; Phillips & Phillips, 1993; Rohrbaugh, 1992) Further, researchers have investigated the stage of added value provided through facilitators for so-called electronic meeting support or assemblage support systems (Miranda & Bostrom 1999; Dickson et al., 1996; Griffith, Fuller & Northcraft, 1998; Tan, Wei, & Lee-Partridge, 1999) Now with proliferation of virtual clumps with members distributed in various sites who rarely work together in the same place at the same time, the use of online meetings has increased tremendously. This at hands additional challenges for group facilitation, especially in circumstances where situational determinants of that kind as distance, time pressure, and efficiency priorities lead to the use of alternative technologies as communication channels (Hinds & Kiesler, 1995; Qureshi & Vogel 2001) including the Internet and World Wide Web. Online facilitation has acquired smooth greater significance as organizations prove by experiment to gain competitive advantage by dint of effective use of virtual teams (Kock 2000; Mittleman, Briggs, & Nunamaker, 2000) Although the ne for specialized facilitation techniques to form and moderate online conferences was identified above 20 years ago (see, for example, Kerr 1986) not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of empirical evidence exists on the effectiveness of facilitated virtual teams (Beise, Niederman, & Beranek, 1999; Hayne, 1999)

The focus of the not absent study is on an increasingly used form of online meeting terminused asynchronous to indicate that the communication between geographically dispersed collection members is not necessarily agreeing (Furst, Blackburn, & Rosen, 1999; Turoff et al., 1993; Warkentin, Sayeed, & Hightower, 1997) of the like kind any-time, any-place (ATAP) meetings are conven by the agency of computer through any local or wide area network or the Internet.

ATAP meetings give each participant greater control over their have schedules; although some simultaneous work times may be station participants also can join in the assemblage process whenever and wherever they have a scarcely any minutes to spare, even late evenings or weekends. ATAP meetings can make use of a variety of formats and tools, including bulletin boards, newsgroup listservs, and chat clusters that allow for open and ongoing communication.

Yet another distinct form of ATAP meeting includes single outed individuals who share responsibility for a belonging to all task, who need to focus upon an explicit problem, and who must win useful results from their collaboration in a fixed period of time. These ATAP meetings are aided through specific facilitation tools that support not single divergent and analytical but especially converging and synthetic group work. In these circumstances, because virtual team members must reach agreement through set

Fdeadlines yet must work somewhat separately and at different times, the added value of clump facilitation in asynchronous online meetings may be greater than in face-to-face settings. The not away paper concerning the multiple parts of online facilitation focuses strictly upon this form of ATAP meeting and individual specific set of facilitation tools named WebWide Participation.

ATAP Meetings from one side WebWide Participation

Web Wide Participation (WWP) is a series of elementary Web pages (see www404techcom/wwp) designed to support single of the most basic functions of ATAP meetings, that is, collection work on "creativity," "production," or "intelligence" tasks. WWP enables participants to bring forward a prioritized list of specific and distinct answers to individual or more questions explicitly pos to them. WWP disclosure was spurred in the last decade by dint of cutbacks in many organizations that red the amount of currency available for travel and l offices to increasingly recentralize their problem-solving processe In these organizations, talks that once brought together a variety of stakeholders and constituencies to share bear upons and explore alternatives are now capitaled less frequently. Participation in policy making is curtailed, and decisions are made with les input. To shift this turn the design of WWP was intended to allow first-time participants regardless of their geographical location to join in the meeting sessions without difficulty, as drawn out as they have the capacity in their office or residence to access the Internet.