Abstract

In recent years, the society in the organizations is changing into the knowledge society where we put a high value on knowledge, and it is being watched how to extract knowledge from the various activities by the knowledge worker. Present knowledge management systems handle only digital information that are easy to deal with by computers. However, the knowledge workers' various activities include not only the computer based activities but also diverse activities which the knowledge workers carry out when meeting other people and sharing the time and space with them in the real world.

We have been studying on face-to-face meetings which are the knowledge workers' various activities in the real world. In this paper, as one of the various meetings, we focus on meetings of the face-to-face and synchronous type which are held regardless of the purpose, time, the place or the subject and can be held anytime and anywhere easily. We call the meeting ``a casual meeting'' and study the support technology about it.

At the casual meeting is hard to record what was discussed. Therefore, the casual meeting has problems: for instance, it has high volatility, it easily loses a link with a previous discussions, and it has no explicit relevance to the conclusions.

Moreover in recent years, with the advance of display technology, we came to assume that two or more displays exist in the environment. In such a multi-display environment, we are likely to be able to hold a meeting by making the presentation tools cooperatively.

Then, in this study, we made a casual meeting system corresponding to the multi-display environment. By using the system we can record the discussion at casual meetings as the contents which are able to be retrieved and reused ``anytime and anywhere'', and we can retrieve and reuse past discussions during or after the meeting.

Moreover, by experiment with the subjects we evaluated the effect of reusing past discussions from the viewpoint of redundancy in the meeting. In this experiment, each subject discussed a topic twice by using the whiteboard and this system respectively. Considering the result of the quantitative evaluation of the content of the discussion, we confirmed that people can concentrate on the current discussion by retrieving and quoting past discussions with the system.