The Congress was conceived of as a "user" congress, which meant that users would be invited to attend and express their views on "uses" or applications in the future. The danger that the committee tried to avoid was to emphasize the technology or the infrastructure over and above applications. The technology or infrastructure should be permitted to evolve as a consequence of the types of applications that people wanted.
The Congress was designed to be time limited. Part of the basis for this decision rested on the scheduling of the Congress: a Sunday morning. Recent experience with other similar forums demonstrated that many participants will leave at the lunch hour even if provided a lunch. Another basis for this decision was the belief that the participants, being knowledgeable in the field of information technology, would be able to quickly arrive at decisions on applications without lengthy discussions or extensive preparation.
The year 2000 was chosen because many developments in information technology have been compressed in the last 10-15 years. A five year window is probably a reasonable time frame given the rapid advancements in technology, infrastructure and applications.
The Congress was designed to include sophisticated, knowledgeable users from the various segments of society that use information. In order to minimize the amount of work needed to communicate directly with invitees, existing groups in the community were identified and were contacted. Each of these groups was requested to nominate representatives to the Congress. Knowledgeable individuals were also identified and directly contacted. Another design feature was the identification of groups with common interests. This identification process took many meetings, but eventually evolved into the following groups: health care, visitor industry, media, higher education, lower education, government, non-profit groups, libraries, and business. Other groups were identified, such as "innovators", but it was finally decided to limit the number of groups to nine, to make the logistics easier to manage.
Each group was to be led by a facilitator. Facilitators were recruited through the Program on Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii. Each facilitator's job was to facilitate the discussions in their respective groups.
Early steering committee discussions focused on the types of outcomes from the groups. Options ranged from a list of top ten applications to a list of top three applications. The final choice of the top three applications was made based on the next design consideration.
After some discussion, the steering committee decided that the invitees should re-convene in a second plenary session to permit them to vote on all applications reported by the user groups. However, it was unwieldy to vote on ten applications per group or 90 applications. A reasonable total number was chosen instead. If each group was limited to its top three applications, then a total of 27 applications could be presented to the Congress.
The next issue was the form of the vote on the 27 applications. After further discussion, it was felt that the Congress should be permitted to vote "dollars" on each of the applications. Furthermore, private dollars and public dollars were chosen to emphasize that there are two sources of funding. The decision to engage in dollar voting was based on the premise that people may decide to rank order priorities differently if asked to vote with money, albeit mock money, than if they are asked to only rank order items with no particular stake. The notion of a stake in the outcome was believed best addressed by the use of dollar voting. Finally, the public dollars were restricted to make invitees aware that public funds in this year were limited and therefore less available than private dollars.