Facilitation of e-meetings: state-of-the-art review

The importance of facilitation in face to face meetings is now well understood and there is an increasing recognition that facilitation is also needed in electronic meetings. Information and communication technology (ICT) support for meetings is becoming increasingly sophisticated and yet support for facilitation lags behind. The aim of this paper is to provide some understanding of the role of the facilitator in e-meetings and to review state of the art in ICT support for the role. The review is structured around six possible alternatives for allocating tasks to the human facilitator and to the ICT system. The key assumption is that the purpose of providing ICT support for facilitation is to improve productivity and increase the effectiveness of e-meetings. With this assumption in mind a number of areas for future research work are identified.