For example, promises made to you through an email exchange will be listed on your screen as outstanding commitments. You can read and post information to the on-line community through an electronic bulletin board , or have heated discussions with smaller groups through asynchronous conferencing . You will find yourself dabbling in data communications, multi-media databases, email protocol standards, interface design, and even sociology. Real-time face to face meetings are the cornerstone behind people working together. It is vital for brainstorming, for rapid evolution of ideas and arguments, for making decisions, and for information exchange.
Technology can support real-time meetings in several ways.
Consider an electronic meeting room where people seated around a table can see a wall-size computer screen, and can access it by connecting their personal computers to the screen via a wireless network. Instead of a mere whiteboard, the group has at hand all the power of contemporary computer applications. With spreadsheets , the group can re-work financial models on the fly and wrangle over the results. With a brainstorming tool , the group can generate and priorize ideas. Even a simple word processor can be used as a public minutes tool , where the group can verify that key points have been marked down.