Assignment #10 : Eric Gunther

This semester my house has to do a room selection for next year. We are living at capacity for the first time in years, so there is a conflict as to who will get what rooms, as people don't want to get shortchanged. In the past we have done this entirely on paper and it has, in some cases, resulted in unnecessary drama. However, technology could help us solve this problem, most specifically through the use of online technology. 

The specific problem we have to solve is selecting a pair of rooms for each person in the house. The members get to select by order of seniority, and must select rooms as well as sign contracts. In the past this problem has been solved by getting everyone together on a free afternoon and taking turns going up to the bulletin board to write your name in a room and sign your contracts. This year we have turned to technology to streamline this process and improve the communications regarding it, so no one will feel shortchanged. We have used email to inform the members who is living in the house and the order in which they should pick their rooms. We used our collaborative webtool, Stevesie.com, to set up a page with the house layout and peoples names who are "squatting" (ie. keeping their same room for the next year). The rest of the areas had open slots so the people in the house could possibly try their own mock room selection before the actual one. Finally, the contract signing is now done online through Cornell, so there will be no need to bring a stack of paper contracts to room selection. Now, our room selection problem which usually takes up the greater part of an afternoon, has been reduced to a simple sequence of selections, which we could probably further solve using technology. Perhaps we can begin the selection by sending a floor layout email to the highest seniority person and have them fill it out and forward the email to the next in line. Eventually it would make it back to the authorities and our room selection would be done completely online!

This is an example of how a "group of people who exhibited problem-solving capabilities came together on-line" (Vieweg et al, pp.2). The Vieweg et al article refers to the VT Shootings where students were able to determine the victims quite accurately through facebook. Similar to our situation, a group of people solved a problem using existing technology in a creative way. However, both these situations could be susceptible to problems; the VT victims information was not guaranteed to be credible through facebook. Someone could have gone on and provided faulty information, but this ended up being somewhat rare in the VT facebook group. Our room selection would be vulnerable human errors in sending emails to the wrong people and people adjusting the floor plan in their emailing and then forwarding that, thus ruining the rest of the choices.