VERN: facilitating democratic group decision making online

VERN is an online collaborative tool that coordinates and distributes the process of finding optimal meeting times across the members of a group. The system combines the underlying democratic process inherent in email chain conversations with a remapping of the voting process to a calendar-based graphical user interface. As an alternative to existing forms of constrained democracy in which members vote from a previously defined set of options, we offer VERN1 as a case study for the potential of using a visual interface to enable all group members to contribute equally without constraints to the group decision making process. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces - Organizational Design, Web-based Interaction H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – Graphical user interfaces (GUI), Screen design H.4.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Office Automation – Groupware, Tim...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: GROUP
• Authors: Sarita Yardi, Benjamin Hill, Stephen Chan
• Keywords: Graphical User Interfaces, GROUP 2005, Group Decision, Information Interfaces