Robert´s rules of order for e-mail meetings

In the excitement of the World Wide Web of hyperlinked multimedia spanning the globe, it´s easy to lose sight of ordinary e-mail, which, like the Web, is built on the enabling infrastructure of the Internet. Yet the average person undoubtedly conducts more business by e-mail than by any other Internet service. Considering the importance and ubiquity of e-mail, it´s surprising that it is not more widely used for group decision making-that is, structured business meetings, or more formally, deliberative assemblies. In the hope of providing basic guidelines and motivating further work, we offer some considerations regarding rules of order for conducting e-mail meetings