VERN

Ben Hill
School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley

Sarita Yardi
School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley

     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: April 2, 2005

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 GUI interface. The result is increased speed and efficiency of voting on meeting times to the critical level necessary for mass adoption among groups of users currently using incompatible calendaring solutions.


Existing Problem and Background

Small group coordination efforts fall upon a single person to manage, track, research, and decide on an optimal solution, leading to an “informed dictatorship” style of decision-making. The individual has to solicit sufficient group feedback and determine a solution. Group members often do not reply or fall victim to the black hole phenomenon , feeling that their voice has no impact in the outcome.


The VERN Solution

The asynchronous nature of the VERN scheduling process reduces the demand on the meeting coordinator, replacing the task of information consolidation with a voting process. We hypothesize that democratic participation increases, both online and face-to-face, in proportion to the speed and ability with which a participant can interact with the online system. Providing a democratically driven scheduling system will result in improved best-fit meeting times and accordingly, higher participation amongst group members.

The VERN system, unlike other web-based scheduling tools, allows meeting attendees to quickly and intuitively select meeting preferences for a variety of meeting styles, then displays the results visually with text overlays for quick scanning. The calendar style interface allows users to “vote” on a given meeting through an intuitive click-and-drag drawing interface that paints preferred, inconvenient, and unavailable times onto a weekly calendar representation. We designed VERN based on consensus decision-making processes - look for general agreement between each individual’s decision, then offer visual representations of best meetings times. By permitting both anonymous and non-anonymous group decisions we promote individual expression and democratic egalitarianism.


Presentation

We will present the interactive VERN system, demonstrating the efficiency and solution advantages of using a distributed process to coordinate meeting times. We will invite audience participation, highlighting the ease with which meeting times are coordinated among spontaneous and non-homogeneous user groups.