VERN: facilitating democratic group decision making online

  • Authors:
  • Sarita Yardi;Benjamin Hill;Stephen Chan

  • Affiliations:
  • UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • GROUP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

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 VERN 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.