The paper discusses a research project carried out by the authors at MCC to provide an environment and facilities that enable systems designers to conduct better face-to-face meetings.

The authors provide a classification of different types of meetings, though for the purpose of the early phase of their research they focus on face-to-face meetings. They develop a model of such meetings as an underpinning for their developmental and experimental work. They briefly review other projects in the United States that attempt to facilitate the process of meetings with the use of automated facilities. Readers with an interest in the topic might like to note some work on meeting environments and supporting software carried out in the United Kingdom [1,2,3].

The authors present an interesting model of meeting progressions including the notion of pots. A pot is a repository of knowledge and understanding, filtered by some process. Each participant at a meeting has a notional pot, and there is also a public pot. The quality of a meeting can be judged by the extent to which there is congruence between the contents of individual pots and the public pot. As described in the paper, an impression (unintentional I believe) is given that participants enter the meeting with empty pots (see fig. 1 in the paper). I would have preferred the model to lay more stress on the processes by which the contents of the pots are changed from before the meeting starts to the end of the meeting. Perhaps more should be said about the premeeting knowledge, understanding, ideological positions and biases, ambitions, and coalition formation of participants.

The authors stress the importance of evaluation, but hardly evaluate their experimental work or discuss how such evaluations can be carried out. If the notion of pots has any value in the theory, it must be possible to examine the contents of pots. But, as workers in the theory of knowledge and knowledge acquisition have shown, that subject presents considerable and possibly insuperable difficulties.

Nevertheless, I welcome this paper. A great deal of attention is being paid to the topic of software engineering. Much of the effort is devoted to the development of formal methods, to CASE tools, and to notions of software factories. This paper focuses on aspects of the software engineering process that are equally important. More research into ways of enhancing the knowledge and understanding of the processes that are used can only have a beneficial impact on the effectiveness of software engineering. But the type of research conducted by the authors also has relevance for the much larger topic of systems to support office activities.