Analysing the Dealing Rights to Speak with a Large Number of Participants

Dealing Rights to Speak (DRS) is a communication-field mechanism enabling people to manage speech order in a decentralized manner. However, the method was evaluated only in small face-toface meetings where less than five people attended. In this paper, we analyze the effect of DRS when it is applied to a meeting where a large number of people, e.g., more than 10, are attending. For this purpose, we first developed a mobile application with which many people can use DRS in their discussions. We performed an experiment with four conditions, i.e., 4 participants with and without DRS and 16 participants with and without DRS. We compared the four conditions in both a subjective and an objective manner. The results show that the effect of DRS on a large number of people is similar to that of a small number of people. Also, some other findings were newly observed. It was shown that the number of “filler” is increased when people use DRS. It was shown that the quality of the meetings tends to degrade when the number of participants increases without any communication-field mechanism though DRS can mitigate the negative effect.