The Meta Environment: A New Group Support System Structure

The greatest success of conventional group support systems (GSS) has been in meetings whose purpose is to extract and record the ideas that participants bring to the meeting. Research supports the usefulness of GSS when complexity is high and groups are large. Conventional GSS almost always require a facilitator or group leader to guide a group through a desired set of tasks. The next natural step beyond conventional GSS is to empower people to use even a broader set of tools in meetings. This article proposes a new GSS structure called the meta environment in which group members bring material into the meeting from their individual workstations, and interact dynamically not only to generate new material, but also to access and analyze existing computer-based information such as spreadsheets and documents. More importantly, a meta environment enables people to work both in synchronism and out of synchronism with the meeting, and adjust to and remember work across meetings. A prototype development project and user testing shows how meta environment components can be built and used. Results from the user testing suggest the need for a new cycle of empirical testing in GSS research to evaluate the effect of the meta environment on existing and new group structures.