Use of Chat in Meetings

Always thought better use of  chat in meetings would be useful, perhaps a means of asking questions of participants by an advisor?    Invocation of humor?    Microsoft research examines chat:

The rise of parallel chat in online meetings: how can we make the most of it?

Published August 3, 2021   By Advait Sarkar , Senior Researcher  Sean Rintel , Principal Researcher

Why do people chat – and is it a good thing for meetings?

PUBLICATION

The Promise and Peril of Parallel Chat in Video Meetings for Work 

To answer these questions, we conducted a study drawing on two sources of data: (1) the diaries of 849 Microsoft employees who journaled their experiences during the summer of 2020, when COVID-19 triggered widespread remote work and online meetings, and (2) a survey of 149 Microsoft employees that specifically asked how they used chat. The paper was accepted at the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

In the survey, the overwhelming majority (85.7%) of participants agreed that parallel chat is a net positive. Only 4.5% responded negatively, and 9.8% were neutral. 

Chat messages themselves can contain a lot of different things: questions; links and documents; agreement and praise that add to what is being conveyed during the call; discussion of related and unrelated topics; and humour and casual conversation. .... '