Convene

Check-ins and synch-ups. Kick-offs and roundtables. Weeklies and monthlies and quarterlies and yearlies. Staff meetings and team meetings and board meetings and all-hands meetings. Meeting before meetings, meetings to plan meetings: meetings, meetings, meetings. It is useful to think of organizations as networked entities. If the people in these networks are the nodes, then meetings are the edges: the connective tissue in the network. Understanding these connections is key to understanding organizational structure, and can offer a tremendous advantage in making decisions around how organizations can and will change. But how do we see these networked structures?

Working closely with Microsoft’s Envisioning Group, we developed Convene, a prototype visualization tool for exploring and understanding meeting activity across large organizations.

Convene is an exploratory visualization tool designed to run on large, touch-enabled screens. Convene offers three connected views of meeting data: Map View, Network View and Graph View. Users can switch seamlessly between these views using simple touch gestures. Each view offers a different approach in understanding meeting activity; together they provide detailed insight into connectivity across the organization.