Formalizing Robert's rules of order

Robert's Rules of Order are the standard procedure for deliberative societies of all kinds in the USA. This paper reports on an ongoing experiment: formalizing these rules for the purpose of implementing them as a procedural component of automated mediation systems for discussion and group decision making. Robert's Rules of Order have been chosen for this experiment because they are well-known, precisely formulated, and well-tested in practice. Although they need to be adapted for electronic applications, their formalization should nevertheless give useful insights into the problems and prospects of adding a procedural component to automated mediation systems. The research is carried out in the context of the ZENO mediation system, developed at the GMD Bonn. One of ZENO's components is a WWW-accessible discussion forum. The aim of the ongoing experiment is to extend this forum with rules of order, and with a corresponding mudule that assists the human mediator in maintaining order at the forum, and in giving advice to the users of the forum on their options, rights and obligations in the discussion. This paper reports on the first part of the experiment, formalizing Robert's Rules of Order in first-order predicate logic. This formal specification should be the basis for a more operational specification, and for the eventual implementation as a component of ZENO.