Suggestion Boxes (add, discuss, and vote on suggestions)

User group: Staff [1,2], Project Group [3]

Location: Pretty much everywhere.

Scenario

You've noticed for the 4th time that the clock in the coffee room is not set. So you walk up to the coffee-room PALplate and add a suggestion: "fix clock time", and vote "Yes!".
While you're there you notice that someone's put up a new suggestion -- "buy artwork to decorate this dump". You vote "Yes!" and add the comment "my niece is a struggling artist ... :-)".
You're project group has been trying to decide on which software to use in developing their web pages. Getting everyone to agree is impossible, so instead, you decide to hold a vote.

Interface

Suggestion topics are simple one-liner handwritten notes, done using the same basic interface as Notes provides (the finger painting widget). In addition to a suggestion topic, entries are categorized according to the area, object, or person/group, they apply to (eg -- public, coffee room, all meeting rooms, all places with candy machines, the PALplates research group, etc). You can only vote on a topic once you've been authenticated -- otherwise, people could vote lots of times on the same topic. Anyone can add suggestions. Once a topic gets a certain number of (yes?) votes, the administrator for the room or area is notified of the suggestion and votes. Of course, if the administrator notices the suggestion earlier, they can implement it any time they want to.

It's clear that not all suggestions would have yes or no answers, but in most cases they can be split up into several topics (eg "Spring Picnic in the park Y/N" + "Spring Picnic in the lake Y/N" + ...). Eventually, we'd like to support other types of answers.

Should there be some support for a image+writing ("multimedia") authoring tool with which people can write documents supporting or against a given voting topic?

Issues

Privacy

In voting, one needs to record who has already voted on an issue or topic while at the same time guarranteeing anonymity to the voter.

Questions:

Should the person who starts the topic also be allowed anonymity?

It is doubtful that a majority vote will be the final say on any matter. How much of the process which occurs after a topic has gotten a large number of votes should be broadcast publicly?

Some tricky issues include:

Making sure that the display resets if a user walks away without logging out. Otherwise someone else could vote on an issue in the original users name.

Hardware

Voting depends on a touch screen with good enough resolution for someone to write legibly with <a finger, a pen?>. It might be nice to also have support for images should someone want to illustrate the case for or against some issue.

Software

Database of people responsible for the room or area. Database of topics and votes.

Network

???