Rule-mitigated collaboration technology

The design of an appropriate paradigm for collaboration ultimately stands or falls on the question of whether human users are able to cooperate effectively with it. In this work, we begin with a paradigm of interaction in which human collaborators have shown themselves facile. This paradigm is based on the formal meeting protocol commonly known as parliamentary procedure or Robert's Rules of Order (RRO). These rules are at the same time descriptive and prescriptive of effective meeting behavior. Electronic meeting systems, likewise, have to manage time and communicative resources, maintain logs, and produce artifacts that constitute the fruit of the collaboration. The technology disclosed here facilitates the generation of coauthored artifacts (documents, designs, project plans, etc.) as the direct outcome of the collaborative process. The efficacy of rule-mitigated collaboration technology is based on four major components: an extended parliamentary procedure rule set, a scoping policy and set of application programming interfaces, an object-based client-server architecture, and an M-Net synchronous meeting environment.