While the Internet with its broad range of services is evolving into a mass medium, new tools are also emerging which lead the Internet back to the intention of its inventors: an interactive medium in which "interaction" is not just browsing, but active participation to generate content. The group-related communication aspect was important in the Internet's early days when the usenet service covered a small community. The Internet is today mainly used as a two-way (e-mail) and narrowcasting (WWW) medium, but the group communication aspect is again becoming increasingly important, so the net is turning into a tool for unified messaging within and across organisations, as well as a one for private communication.
Three issues of group-related telecommunications services are discussed in this book on the level of concepts and fields of application:
First, groups exchanging messages need to come to decisions on selected topics. Due to the non-committal and unstructured manner of electronic communication, experts recommend to make decisions in face-to-face meetings rather than electronically and to use electronic mail only for agendas setting or distributing preview information . Voting support in groupware provided as a method to structure issues or to collect personal preferences could substantially improve decision-making processes. They could become more transparent and participation would be more egalitarian.
Second, communication services involving many people must have information selection capabilities. Rating is a fair approach to obtaining indicators on the quality of contributions, which can then be employed by other users looking for suitable information.
Third, documents need adequate ways of being commented on. Annotation services allow users either to make comments within given documents, or to retrieve comments held in storage separately from the original document.
Today's business and social relations need flexibility which must be mirrored in the communicative settings. Voting, rating and annotation features add adaptability to groupware services designed for use in real-world environments.
The project Web4Groups funded by the European Commission under the Telematics Applications Programme is to devise a multimedia groupware platform. Voting, rating and annotation facilities will be included as advanced features. A study and a conference on theoretical issues, fields of application and implementation aspects have launched an exchange of ideas among experts within and outside the project consortium. The study was distributed among the project partners in February 1997. The "First European Conference on Voting, Rating, Annotation" was held in Vienna in April 1997. This book contains a revised version of the study and the conference contributions. It summarises the current discussion in the field and makes it available to a broader community providing telematic services or active in research on CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), or (GDSS) Group Decision Support Systems.

Contents

Part A / Voting and rating in Web4Groups (Roland Alton-Scheidl, Rupert Schmutzer, Peter Paul Sint, Gernot Tscherteu
A.0. Introduction
A.1. The Web4Groups project
A.2. Perspectives for voting and rating in Web4Groups
A.2.1. A basic understanding of voting and rating
A.2.2. Rating in everyday life
A.2.3. Voting and telecommunications
A.2.4. A side issue: surveying in the social sciences
A.2.5. Voting and rating agents for Web4Groups
A.2.6. References

Part B / Telematic voting, rating and annotation services
B.1. Concepts of voting, rating and annotation services
B.1.1. Features for freedom (Marilyn Davis)
B.1.2. Voting theory and web-based decision tasks: the Steven Assessment Center (Arnold B. Urken)
B.1.3. The on-line preferendum (David R.Newman)
B.1.4. Choices in the implementation of rating (Jakob Palme)
B.1.5. A rating game ???? (Gernot Tscherteu)
B.1.6. User interface plan for voting and rating functionality of Web4Groups (Gergo Kiss, Laszlo Kovacs , Andras Micsik)
B.1.7. Active annotations of web pages (Jakob Hummes)
B.1.8. Security annotations (Daniel LaLiberte)
B.2. Application fields of voting and rating services
B.2.1. Telematic activities of the city of Vienna (Torsten Grštz)
B.2.2. The Bologna Metropolitan 'Civic Network': Internet as communication channel and new 'public sphere' (Leda Guidi)
B.2.3. Building citizen-based electronic democracy efforts (Steven L.Clift)
B.2.4. Telematic tools in mutual support (Philipp Sonntag)
B.2.5. Forest planning processes in a CMC context (Miklos Irmay)
B.2.6. Scenarios for voting and rating using Web4Groups compiled by (Rupert Schmutzer)
B.3. Outlook (Roland Alton-Scheidl, Rupert Schmutzer, Peter Paul Sint, Gernot Tscherteu)