Of project groups and decisions

In Pune recently for the weekend, I met up with all those friends from college who happened to be in Pune on that weekend, since everyone had split up to live his own life (Alas! Those college days...). As we were discussing 'those college days', the topic of our final year projects came up. And of course, that of the time when everyone was busy forming project groups. It happened that we had a rather unusual way of forming our project groups. We had what you would call a democratic decision of who will be partners with whom. Here is how it went:

We gathered up 9 people who had no clue what the project or how the groups should be. We then proceeded to procrastinate till the penultimate day on which the project groups were to be submitted. The proper time had now come to resolve issues - the eleventh hour. I think it was D who came up with the radical solution to our particular problem. He suggested we all gather in one place. We write down what our interests were. The 'domains' in which we wanted to do our projects in. We then read out all of the chits on which we had written everything down.

And then we decide, based on our project interests and who we wished to work with, who our tentative project partners should be.

The fact that finally the project groups turned out to be almost exactly the same as we had 'voted' speaks very well for this kind of decision system for this particular application.