BallotShare: Exploring the Design Space of Digital Voting in a Workplace Environment

Digital voting is used in a variety of contexts from politics to mundane everyday decisions. One of the motivations underlying many group decision-making systems is the promotion of participation, yet there is little research that explores how features of digital voting systems can be designed to facilitate this, other than providing multiple voting channels. In this paper we propose a framework that explores the design space of digital voting from the perspective of participation. We ground our discussion in the design of BallotShare, a first configuration of our proposed framework, designed to enable the study of group decision-making practices deployed in a workplace setting. Across five weeks, participants created and took part in non-standard polls relating to events and other spontaneous group decisions. Following interviews with participants we identify significant drivers and limitations of individual and collective participation in the voting process: social visibility, social inclusion, commitment and delegation, accountability, influence and privacy. © 2014 Newcastle University. Printed and published by Newcastle University, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical details VLACHOKYRIAKOS, V., DUNPHY, P., TAYLOR, N., COMBER, R., OLIVIER, P. BallotShare: Exploring the Design Space of Digital Voting in a Workplace Environment [By] V. Vlachokyriakos, P. Dunphy, N. Taylor, R. Comber and P. Olivier Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University: Computing Science, 2014. (Newcastle University, Computing Science, Technical Report Series, No. CS-TR-1410)