How did your group make the decisions? What problems did you encounter in the process? Did your group make decisions in a different way than the whole class did? Why? What kind of information system do you need to design to support such a process of negotiation? Provide a simple hardware/software configuration.

Once everyone understood the project,we decided to share our spreadsheets with everyone else in this group. The communication and decision-making was being done by email and was mostly led by one group member who had the best handle on the project. This group member combined all the spreadsheets into one document and aggregated points for the different scenarios, knocking the least fair off the list, until finally we were left with two.

This is where we hit a snag. We decided to make our final decision before class. During class there was much debate. With only two choices left, and with 4 of the 6 people benefiting from ’scenario II’ but with scenario 1 having a smaller range and less deviation from the mean, it became a somewhat frictious debate. The 3 people with the most to lose in switching between scenarios I and II were not budging. Ultimately, the one outnumbered 2:1 was willing to concede. However, luckily, by consulting an outside facilitator (the professor) we learned we were able to share points and reach a conclusion where we’d all receive the average score.

It would be interesting to see if this assignment had occurred earlier in the semester, as maybe we would not have decided to share our spreadsheets, or to share points.

The best software and hardware applications would have been for us to individually input our numbers into one ‘master document’ on a network that we could all access. It would have been preferable if people were given anonymous IDs rather than have their names listed with the scenario on the document. Software that would quickly sum the points each individual would receive for each scenario would speed up the process. Done this way, the process would have been considerably more anonymous. I believe if we could have done project anonynmously, people might have been more likely to vote in favor of their self-interests(we would not have to choose a seat at the table in the cartoon below). In this case, an online poll would need to be implemented and a security key (so that people only vote once) created. If we decided to not be anonymous, helpful software for this project would have been an online chatroom where we could have all discussed at once, rather than through an inefficient email trail.