Beyond Talking Heads: Multimedia Artifact Creation, Use, and Sharing in Distributed Meetings

Abstract

Distributed meetings can be messy, particularly when the task requires collaboration around multimedia artifacts. Teams must not only share a variety of materials related to the work in real time, but also need to refer back to information after a meeting ends. While video tools make it relatively easy to have conversations at a distance, they are less adept at sharing and archiving multimedia content. We conducted a survey of and interviews with members of distributed teams to investigate how they create, use, and share multimedia content before, during, and after distributed meetings. Our findings shed light on decisions made and rationales used in selecting technologies to prepare for, conduct, and archive the results of a video-mediated distributed meeting. The results suggest a need for flexible interfaces for information sharing in multiple meeting contexts so content can be both easily referred to in the moment and also found again later.