WE'VE ALL BEEN THERE. YOU'RE IN A MEETING, AND SOMEONE IS MONOPOLIZING THE DISCUSSION, PUSHING A PARTICULAR VIEWPOINT THAT BECOMES OVERLY WEIGHTED IN A GROUP DECISION. SOMEONE ELSE, WHO HAS A VALUABLE CONTRIBUTION, SITS QUIETLY ON THE SIDE, TOO SHY TO SPEAK UP.

Is there a way for technology to correct this social dynamic, increasing self-awareness so that group interaction is improved? Joan Morris DiMicco, a PhD candidate studying with Walter Bender in the Lab's Electronic Publishing group, is exploring this possibility with Second Messenger, a new interface built expressly for improving dynamics in face-to-face, small group interactions.

Second Messenger technology is very simple. Everyone in the room wears a microphone that detects voice levels, but does not actually record the conversation. The voice levels are instantaneously fed to a program that translates these to

(above) Circles indicate speakers, growing larger with greater participation, while bar-code-like graphics display patterns of interaction: blue shows who is speaking, red shows overlapping conversation, yellow shows isolated comments.

An earlier version of Second Messenger was more complex, using voice recognition rather than voice-level detection, actually displaying the words during the meeting, filtering out the dominant people and emphasizing the people who hadn't spoken as much. But the voice recognition software was just not as effective, as it was designed for complete sentence dictation rather than for conversational speech. In addition, since Second Messenger has no recording capability, any privacy issues are eliminated.

(above) Circles matching participants' physical position around a table indicate their level of involvement. The smaller colored segments in each circle indicate how many times each other participant is overlapping the speaker.