A meeting system is any systemic means of improving meetings, workshops or conferences. They are particularly important in consensus decision making and deliberative democracy, but they have always been recognized as important to judicial procedure and parliamentary procedure, down to the level of the town meeting or below.
There are also several types of meetings, Formal meeting, Annual General Meeting, Statutory Meeting, Board Meeting.
There are many such systems, of which one of the best-known is probably Robert's Rules of Order, which is applied in parliamentary debate and corporate meetings in many English-speaking countries. Also well-known is the cross-examination debate applied in both criminal law and civil law. Much innovation in meeting systems has come from objection to these two basic models, notably because both reflect an adversarial process.
When used in political or economic contexts, meeting systems are very often associated with a voting system. When used in matchmaking or other sexual/romantic contexts, a meeting system is considered a dating system. These are discussed in other articles.
Examples of meeting systems
- Robert's Rules of Order
- Cross-examination debate
- Consensus decision making
- Dotmocracy
- Nominal Group Technique
- Open Space Technology
- Erskine May's Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament
- Any genuine dating system, i.e. those where people really meet