The shape of online meetings

Live videoconferencing has become an integral part of international virtual learning and working with professionals, educators and students using online meetings to enhance their collaboration from different parts of the world. This paper explores the visualization of a set of different online meetings produced by the FlashMeeting' videoconferencing system. Our polar area visualization analysis reveals interesting patterns in participant dominance in online meetings: seminars, interviews, moderated project meetings, peer-to-peer meetings, web-casts and video lectures. Visualizing patterns in the use of foreground and background communication channels is a promising way to help us to start to explore individual user roles in different communities and in different meeting types.