Second Messenger

Joan Morris DiMicco

Second Messenger
The underlying assumption behind Second Messenger is that technology can be used to improve group decision-making. It is a system that focuses on encouraging a group to change its interaction during a meeting, based on the idea that making a group aware of its potentially flawed interaction while it is taking place affords the group the opportunity to correct its behaviour. When interacting face-to-face, individuals utilise their natural strengths in communicating opinions and intentions, yet also naturally overly rely on the group’s dominating opinions, as already discussed. We postulate that a system observing the natural dynamics of a group interaction can detect skewed group processes and can then influence the group, through visual displays of social information, to alter its interaction to focus more successfully on the breadth of ideas in a discussion. participant. As a group interacts, the display dynamically adjusts the bars of a histogram to indicate the relative participation rates. The system is built again with a client/server architecture, where each client machine determines when someone is speaking by detecting the sound level from individual microphones.

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