A few simple, intuitive notions underlie the MeetingWeb model :

• We learn by doing.

• We grow by putting what we know in the context of what others have learned;
  we succeed by responding to opportunity.

• Organizational expertise is dynamic; it is embedded in the ongoing discussions and ideas of the members not in final, formal documents.

• Effective professional training is continuous, collaborative and flexible.

MeetingWeb creates the context for effective collaboration
MeetingWeb is designed to encourage capturing, structuring, reworking, and reviewing ideas, insights, information, and experience.

A plain newsgroup, a message board dressed up in HTML, or a rigid class-based instruction model lacks the flexibility and power of MeetingWeb.

Many "groupware" and courseware" products" on and off the Internet maintain a hierarchical, "document-centered approach" to collaboration and training. Yet most group work does not focus on group editing of documents. Canned content is easily delivered via simple low-cost web servers and web pages, by CD-ROM and/or the most portable of media: paper.

MeetingWeb's instant orientation
From a free-form brainstorming session where anyone can start a new topic to a highly structured, moderator-controlled agenda, MeetingWeb makes it easy to follow, contribute to and commit to a project or course. Text files, html files, and image links can be uploaded from a hard disk, pasted in or attached to a MeetingWeb comment.

Your first visit to a meeting is designed to quickly orient you to the content and flow of the meeting conversation and to point you to any related documents.

• In the default "Conversation Meeting View" comment links appear in the order participants or moderators have placed them--where they think they will be most intelligible to the group.

• An optional title line is indented under the link to the topic or comment to which it is a reply.

• Every comment link in this view displays a descriptive line, either an optional author summary line or the first line of the comment along with the comment's date and length.

• Multiple comment status tags help you quickly spot new, recent, found, modified, and unapproved comments within a meeting's context. Unique to MeetingWeb is the user-settable persistent comment tag. You can toggle the persistent tag on to make sure an important comment remains visible when you return to a meeting and to gather a special set of comments to export to a single page to display or file to download. When you're done, you can simply toggle off the persistent tag.

MeetingWeb matches the format to the user
... not the user to the format
The Meeting View is easily changed to suit each user's information priorities, working style, and network speed. A click of the Preferences button offers comment ordering by date as well as control over the status of comments to be displayed. More controls include Special Search Results View, Custom Export View, Single Topic View and Expand and Compress Topic options.

You can embed documents in a meeting or insert links to standard web, newsgroup and ftp resources on any local or global server using Internet protocols.

You can attach files of any format type to your meeting comments, thus avoiding automatic downloads that slow meeting performance for other users.