In this paper we discuss our experience designing and collecting a data corpus called ELEA (Emergent LEader Analysis), and describe the use of a light portable scenario to record small group meetings. The corpus was gathered with the aim of analyzing emergent leadership, as a social phenomenon that occurs in newly formed groups. For each group in the corpus, the participants performed the winter survival task. To date, the annotations of the corpus include personality, concepts related to leadership, and participants’ performance in the survival task. In addition, several features have been extracted automatically from audio and video.