I’m friends with some guys down in Bloomington who are very actively developing web applications for fun and profit. One of their latest concoctions is a tool to simplify the arduous task of getting a group of people to come to a concensus.
Their application, DecideAlready, let’s you ask a question, propose reponses, and identify the people who get a say in the final answer. What could take several hours (or days!) of debate can be condensed down into a few minutes of everyone’s time to weigh in.
You get to set up the rules of how the decision is calculated. The simplest approach is everyone gets to vote for their favorite option. Count up the votes, and the option with the most votes win. Alternatively, you can allow everyone to rank the options in order from their top choice to bottom choice. Or if you really want to get down into the details, set the criteria for the decision and let the respondents use a slider to determine how well each option fits that criteria.
I asked a question of ten people in my address book about how they would rank some of today’s popular online tools for helping their business. Here’s what I got back:
