Group Evaluation Query System Summary

Experience shows that there are psychological problems with discussions via e-mail. The reason for these efficiency problems is probably the long turn-around-time and the lack of body language and voice inflection. This specification describes a proposed service, which intends to alleviate this problem by helping people in a discussion group find out the views of each other without an overflow of messages. If this service is successful, it will make use of electronic mail more efficient.

By Jacob Palme, e-mail: jpalme@dsv.su.se, at the research group for CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) in the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and KTH.

More and more of the communication in our society is done through e-mail. However, many researchers on the social and organizational effects of e-mail have shown that there are certain problems when e-mail is used for decisions. A more comprehensive overview about this is given in appendix A of the full specification. There is a tendency, when discussing an issue through e-mail, to repeat arguments over and over and never get to a conclusion. This sometimes causes discussions through e-mail to take too much time. One of the reasons for this is probably the lack of body language, which means that a person has to write a message to show his/her opinion.
   Because of this, experienced users of e-mail tend to organize their work so that agreements on controversial issues are taken at face-to-face meetings. However, because of the high cost of travel, face-to-face meetings in geographically distributed groups cannot be held very often. It would thus be beneficial, if agreements on controversial issues could more easily be reached while discussing issues via e-mail.
Discussions through e-mail can be aided by several different additional services. One such service is a service to easier find out the views of people, and to find out which issues are the real controversial issues.
A simple example. A decision has to be taken about the time for a meeting. In a face-to-face meeting, the most common algorithm for making such a decision is:

1. Someone proposes a date.
2. Someone else says: No, that date is not good for me.
3. A new date is proposed.
4. Go back to step 2 until a date has been found which is accepted by all.

This process is then repeated until a date is found which is satisfactory to all who are present. Those who could not come to the meeting are ignored. The process described above will not work through e-mail. Because of the long turn-a-round time, typically 6-48 hours, the process described above will take too much time. In e-mail, instead, the best procedure to decide on the time for a face-to-face meeting has been found to be the following algorithm:

1. Propose five to ten different possible dates.
2. Ask each participants how good those dates are for them.
3. Collect the responses, tabulate them, and select the best date.

We believe that a similar algorithm could be beneficial to many discussions through e-mail. The algorithm would be one of enumerating alternatives, and asking each participants to rate each of the alternatives, typically on a scale like "very good, good, acceptable, bad, very bad". Such a query would give valuable information about the opinions of people, about which issues are controversial, and would thus aid decisions. Note that it is not our proposal that decisions should be taken automatically by some kind of electronic voting procedure. Our proposal is to aid the human decision making by finding and tabulating the views of people. In a normal face-to-face meetings, such views are to a large extent communicated by body language, voice inflection and other channels not available when communicating via e-mail.
   We think the best procedure should list the names of each participant and what their views were. In many discussion groups, the goal is not to reach any majority decision. Rather, the opinions of those with lot of competence and knowledge is valued more than the opinions of beginners. This is well-known and accepted.
This proposal suggest the setting up of a WWW and e-mail-based service. The basic facilities of this service will be:

1. Through interaction via the WWW, the chair can specify a query.
2. The query is then sent by e-mail to participants (or, if the query organizer so prefers, the form is put up on a web page).
3. The participants respond individually.
4. Their responses are collected through e-mail.
5. The result is reported on the WWW or through e-mail.