Communicating through preferences

This paper is concerned with the creation and management of events in a community of persons with common interests. We introduce concepts and tools for performing the following activities by members of the community: (a) proposing events in which the members of the community can participate (b) expressing preferences over a set of proposed events (c) choosing the events that best fit the community with respect to the expressed preferences and (d) announcing to the community the chosen events that are to take place. We focus on the design of communication and collaborative decision making, and we outline the design of an online system that supports these activities. Our proposal can be seen as a generalization of existing tools like Doodle, an online system for setting up meeting times.