Voting or Evaluation: an E-CARGO Perspective

Voting is a widely accepted method for decision-making and for assigning positions to members of committees. For instance, each year, most IEEE Societies or Councils conduct elections to renew its Executive Committee (ExCom) or Administrative Committee (AdCom) in accordance with the Society’s or council’s bylaws. However, traditional voting methods, though easy to follow and broadly accepted, may not always yield the most effective outcomes. This article proposes a new, computation-based approach to committee member selection, grounded in the environments-classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects (E-CARGO) model and the role-based collaboration (RBC) methodology. Developed and refined over the past two decades, E-CARGO/RBC provides a solid foundation for modeling and solving complex collaborative and decision-making problems, particularly those involving team-based dynamics. Through comparative analysis and a case study, this work demonstrates how the proposed computational approaches surpass the traditional way in the selection of ExCom/AdCom members, and achieve more effective position assignments than traditional voting-based approaches.