From Face-to-Face to Virtual: The Evolution of e-Liberate

From apse

Since hundreds of thousands of "deliberative assemblies" (cite), ranging from nationally elected representative bodies like the US Senate to "voluntary associations" consisting of a handful of members, use Roberts Rules of Order (cite) -- or something quite similar -- to conduct their face-to-face meetings, it seemed natural enough to develop a web-based application that would (help) provide analogous services to assemblies whose members had access to the Internet but lacked the resources or inclinations (or both) to attend in-person meetings. While Roberts Rules of Order is fairly well-known by this name in the US and other places and is less well known or unknown elsewhere, the standardized procedure of "making motions", "obtaining a second" for the motion, discussing the matter in a -- hopefully -- orderly way and, unless the matter is "tabled", is voted upon by the members of the assembly, becoming a directive of the assembly if it garnered the mandated number of affirmative votes from the voting membership. Amazingly enough, it appears that as late as 2004, there was no application with this functionality on the Internet, a situation we set out to remedy -- beginning our efforts in 1998 (?).

The proposition that an online version of Roberts rules of Order would be a straightforward undertaking proved to be not as obvious as it once seemed. Indeed there was a plethora of issues that were introduced by this "simple" assignment of faithfully adapting the face-to-face situation upon which Roberts Rules was carefully crafted to an online environment where members are not physically co-present and, indeed, could be half a world away.

We mention in passing that globalization and the increasingly urgent need to deliberate across borders on such matters as climate change and environmental degradation provide convincing inducement for launching a project as this. This paper presents the diversity of issues that were uncovered during this project and discusses the cases in which we believe that we have developed appropriate responses and those in which we seem to be stymied.