On the Acceptance of Automatic Facilitation in a Context-Adaptive Group Support System

Problem solving in groups usually consists of different phases. The quality of the results highly depends on applying suitable methods (e.g., to improve creativity or to support shared understanding). This is usually the responsibility of a trained facilitator. However, good facilitators are a scarce resource. In this paper, we explore the acceptance of automatic facilitation in a context-adaptive Group Support System (GSS) implemented on the Contact platform -- our infrastructure for implementing context-adaptive collaboration environments. We show how good practices related to the process of creative problem solving can be used to define interventions and identify the situations, in which they are needed, to achieve a good problem solving process. Based on these characterizations we show how to develop group-based adaptation policies implementing automatic facilitation. A pilot study with distributed autonomous teams of 4-5 people using our prototype system provide insights on the acceptance of automatic facilitation.