Virtuous Meetings: Technology + Design for High Engagement in Large Groups

PrefaceThe Evolution of an Idea

The year is 1991 and the first Apple Macintosh laptops have just been released. Lenny Lind and Jim Ewing, an OD consultant and former satellite programmer, are in a hotel meeting room late one night, networking twelve of these new laptops together with telephone cables so that a senior executive team can have a “groupware” facilitated offsite meeting in the morning. Jim clicks a button on one laptop and eleven screens around the room all change all at once. The atmosphere is that electric combination of anticipation and anxiety (mostly the latter) that always accompanies a thing that's never been done before…

Lenny, a successful commercial photographer in San Francisco in the late 1970s, switched from shooting ...