NotePals

Lightweight Meeting Support Using Personal Digital Assistants and Note-Taking Appliances

NotePals is a lightweight meeting support system that automatically combines individuals' meeting notes into a shared record. Shared records are essential to maintaining organizational knowledge. Often, meeting scribes maintain such records, but this puts a heavy load on the scribe and makes all notes subject to his interpretation. Computerized meeting rooms capture information during meetings, but these rooms are expensive and not available in most meeting environments. In the NotePals system, group membersrecord their own notes on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), and the notes are combined automatically into a shared document. This system spreads note taking responsibility across the group, and group members need only PDAs during their meetings.

NotePals notes are taken in digital ink, which is free-form and frees group members from having to learn a shorthand or correct handwriting recognition. After a meeting, group members dock their PDAs with the personal computers on their desktops, and the notes are uploaded to a central web server where the group can view the shared notes. Notes are organized by type (which the user specifies) and the context (time, workgroup, etc.) in which they were taken.

We have built a prototype of the NotePals system and are now extending the work in several areas. We are enhancing the notes browser to organize notes more intelligently and to allow the group members to re-organize them. We are also looking into using external media (such as presentation slides) as context for notes. User tests are also underway to evaluate the note taking interface and to examine the effect of shared notes on group note-taking practices.

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