J: Jumping In - Holding yourself back and letting others in

My favourite, and least offensive joke for the under fives.

There is one aspect of meeting culture that drives everyone nuts. That’s when the interrupting sheep, mmmm, interrupts. There is always one in a meeting (sometimes it’s me) and it’s really quite annoying. In an in-person meeting space these kind of behaviours are often controlled by the group dynamic, ‘I think Jane was speaking their John?’, or ‘perhaps David has something to add to this discussion Ash?’ helps no end. However, in an online only meeting the body language and group dynamics are largely absent so people need a little help.

Meeting Canary has three ways to help…

Firstly, when one is when over speaking is detected the canary raised an eyebrow, that’s nice and subtle – because sometimes speaking over each other is not a bad thing – it’s a measure of excitement and energy.

Secondly, in the side bar of meetings Meeting Canary provides another real-time diagram of the speaker relationships – the blob is the amount of time that person is speaking, and the line thickness is how often they spoke to that person – so at a glance you can see if people are being ignored.

Finally in the post-match analysis of the meeting the number of times people spoke over each other is presented giving an insight into that aspect of meeting behaviour – that, if necessary, you could act upon.

Oh and one really neat trick here is to look at peoples faces in their little boxes, those things just under the nose are called lips – if they appear to flap about, chances are they want to speak, and yes you can click the hand raise as well, at least that makes it more obvious your have something to say.