Practical Internet Groupware

Using Messages to Conduct Polls

In groupware contexts, information management doesn’t just mean doing a better job of organizing mailing list or newsgroup discussions. It also means using these communication tools creatively to add structure to otherwise free-form interactions. Polling to discover a group’s consensus on an issue is, as we’ll see in this section, something you can weave into the flow of email or newsgroup messaging.

How often have you sent out a message asking people’s opinions about some topic, waded through dozens of responses, and at the end of the process still not been sure what the consensus opinion was? In this section, we’ll look at two ways to turn an email query or a newsgroup posting into a mini-application that conducts a poll.

The first method relies on a special kind of mailto: URL that anyone can include in an email message or newsgroup posting. It also relies on simple client-side email filtering, a feature that’s available in many popular mailreaders, including Netscape Messenger, Microsoft Outlook Express, and Qualcomm Eudora.

The second method assumes that there’s a web-based polling application running in your groupware environment. I’ll illustrate the concept using a Java servlet that implements a very simple kind of web-based polling (see Chapter 10), but the same idea would apply to any polling application that expresses votes as URLs that can be sent as email or posted to a newsgroup.

In both cases, the strategy is the same. Much of the information ...