Voting on the agenda: the key to social efficient meetings

Meetings are important communication and coordination instruments for project management. Nevertheless, they are often considered a partial waste of group time and effort. We claim the agenda itself is the main reason for meetings inefficiency. We propose a new meeting technology that embeds an agenda planning method based on the VCG incentive mechanism for assigning value to public goods. A case study, applying this idea to engineering project meetings, has shown the potential improve on meeting effectiveness, efficiency and participation value. Preliminary results have shown an improvement of 30% in meeting quality.