Group Decision Maker

The Group Decision Maker would be used by groups of two or more people to reach different types of decisions. A referee would establish the membership of each group, the issues to be decided, and the types of decisions to be reached. At any time, any members of a group could review past decisions and their outcomes. The referee could create new groups; add, change, or delete members from a group; review past decisions and their outcomes; and establish new issues to be decided along with their associated methods for determining their outcomes.

The users of this project would be any group of people working together over a span of time that wanted to systematically make and record the results of their decisions. They could be people involved in

• collectively making yes or no decisions with different types of majority rules--from one more than half to unanimous--with votes of yes, no, and abstain.
• establishing relative rankings of a set of requirements
• virtual auctions--where each participant bids from an equal pool of fictitious currency for ownership of a group of objects, such as an estate)

A search performed through the Alta Vista search engine uncovered no software for performing this type of function. This may be because most groups make decisions in a face-to-face manner, recording decisions by hand. In the future where much work would be done by geographically dispersed people communicating over a network, a tool that helps groups make decisions will become more useful.