Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Virtualizing Consensus

Author:Philip Suh
Posted:2/26/1999; 12:39:35 PM
Topic:Technography, Knowledge Management and Frontier
Msg #:3277 (In response to 3273)
Prev/Next:3276 / 3278



Do you have any ideas how you could "virtualize" the process of getting agreement?


Some online multiplayer games have great interfaces for letting players agree to what game/map/settings to use for their games.  Myth II from Bungie has a dialog and set of controls where the host chooses the game, the players can all chat and discuss the settings, and then everyone signals agreement by pressing a 'ready' button.  It's cool--whenever the host changes settings, everyone's status is set to 'unready', so you have to check in your agreement to the changes.  The game can't start till everyone is in agreement.  (Hmm.  A screenshot of this would be good, but I'd have trouble expaining booting up a game at work.... maybe later today.)  Note that the games have custom protocols that are lighter and more efficient than HTTP.


 Could a group of people in a web browser really reach consensus without frustrating all the people with its slowness? 


 I don't believe a browser is the right interface for  this.


But if you have to do it in a browser, I'd go forward on the assumption that everyone will check in when they feel like it--it's hard to get people together on the web at the same time (another option is designing a system where everyone is on the same conference call--but they can send anonymous messages and vote via the web browser.  Hey, I bet  Mr. DeKoven would like that!)


My imagined interface: ICQ or Hotline (for chat) with an Opinion Console for voting, and expressing shades of agreement or disagreement. The Opinion Console would show  icons representing everyone's mood in the meeting-- the mood icons would be anonymous and ordered from positive to negative, and you could change your mood icon from a popup menu.  The chat feature would allow you to chat both anonymously and with a username.


BTW, Hotline allows you to change your icon during chat (although not anonymously).  It would not be hard to make a set of mood icons to use during a discussion.


Most of these interface ideas come from Bernie--I went over to technography.com and read some articles this morning.  I got excited because there are definitely technologies to do this stuff available--someone just needs to customize the software already out there.


Someone could put together a VBScript/RealBasic apps that do this and talk to a Frontier server.  Or a cross platform Java app.  Hey, that'd be cool. Chuck Shotton's already done java chat, hasn't he?


Or HERE's a thought: IRC in Frontier! LOL!




			

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