Empirical CATeam research in meetings

Meeting research and especially research on Computer Supported Meetings of natural teams is not available in abundance. What is reported of meetings often uses a rather limited theoretical research framework and rarely captures the richness, both in theory and practice of meetings. Also, it is often implicitly assumed that meetings with computer support are very similar to meetings without computer support. However, meetings are very complex structured, change dynamically and radically with different technologies involved and therefore should be looked at from different perspectives. This paper first describes the initial assumptions and premises on which the CATeam-research programme is based, including background, research environment and software used. It then analyses changes in meetings supported by GroupSystems from the perspectives of positivist empirical research, case studies and a more ethnographic approach. Observations on facilitation, anonymity, parallelism, task focus, participation in natural group meetings are discussed in greater detail.