Meetingware can also be used for electronic focus groups, with participants giving their numeric reactions to presentation moment by moment. Following the presidential campaign debates between Bill Clinton and Robert Dole in 1996, Newsweek magazine published a story displaying reactions of a focus group to key sentences during the debate. Nearly 3,000 visitors filled out the survey form. If it seems that the conference room has become your second office, it probably has. Half the respondents in the 3M Meeting Network survey say they attend more meetings today than they did three years ago, and only a quarter say the opposite.
Meetings are increasingly collaborative.
As this evolution progresses, formal conference rooms are likely to be replaced by informal meeting rooms designed for getting work done. The meeting room's primary value is going to shift to collaborative work. Meetings often involve remote participants. Ten years ago, truly global companies were rare and few people had heard of telecommuting. Back then, most of us never took part in meetings that involved remote participants, according to the 3M survey.