In many cases it is beneficial for the effectiveness of a meeting if people assume a cooperative stance. Cooperative conversations can be measured objectively using media processing. When cooperation is threatened due to one or more participants seeking control over the conversation, the facilitator or chair should facilitate the participants to have their say, to cut off people who make their contribution too long or to intervene when contributions are not relevant to the discussion at hand. Discussions should be properly organized to have arguments develop, so that all positions are put to the fore, and relevant pros and cons are raised. People that are too dominant or influential in meetings may violate one or more of the cooperative maxims and thereby frustrate the process of collective decision making for which many meetings are intended.

The HMI group of Twente University has developed a tool that is able to measure the influence levels of the participants. Aspects such as the interruption frequency and the number of floorgrabs are used to calculate the relative performance for each of the participants. The resulting measures can be used as input for live meeting assistance, as well as become part of accessible organizational memory. For the JFerret framework, a plugin has been developed that displays the conveyed influence levels over the whole meeting. [more information, for a movie [dominance video]