Motivation What are some "new world" approaches to Scheduling in Chandler that take free-busy and invitations out of their traditionally corporate environments and turn them into features customized for calendar usage by individuals and small groups?

Source From the design mailing list, here's the first message in the thread: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2005-December/003687.html

Framing the issue

It's tempting to imagine a world where we could schedule things without the need for any human interaction (ie. emails flying back and forth).

"Ideal scenario:" I want to schedule a meeting. I know right from the start who needs to come to that meeting. I have access to everyone's free-busy info and it is clean and accurate. The client software automatically picks the next available time-slot, I click Send and it drops auto-magically onto everyone else's calendars...and another angel gets his wings ;o)

But the truth is that negotiation is a given part of the scheduling process. Whether that negotiation is a result of

1. Not having access to perfect free-busy information OR
2. Because you find out you forgot to add someone to the invite list OR
3. Because one of your invitees points out that there are dependencies you haven't considered that would make the meeting much more productive if it happened next week

...negotiation and back and forth are inevitable and necessary. And for some organizations, it's a part of the culture. (As in, auto-selecting times and auto-dropping events onto people's calendars comes off as rude and presumptuous.)

So perhaps negotiation itself is not the problem. Rather, it's the way in which it happens...as lots and lots of emails, disconnected to the event itself and spread out all over your Inbox.

A second problem with scheduling software which ends up generating a lot of superfluous negotiation email is that they force users to make decisions that are either

1. unnecessary (ie. I could meet anytime tomorrow, but Outlook forces me to pick a specific time. And then I find out that the specific time I chose doesn't work.) OR

2. that they're not ready to make. (ie. I don't know when we should have this meeting, I want feedback from the other meeting participants. But I know we need to have a meeting soon.)

Below is just one proposal for how we might improve the negotiation process for scheduling. Cutting down noise in negotiation, while providing a flexible framework for important discussion that's easy to keep track of.

Workflow Proposal

1a. Select a specific time OR

1b. Select a fuzzy time-frame for a meeting (this would appear as the Date/Time info for the meeting).

• This week
• The first two weeks of next month
• Tomorrow
• Next month

2. Specify the duration if you know. Otherwise, Chandler assumes some default duration.

3. Chandler spits back a list of available times.

• 2-4PM Tomorrow
• 10-2PM next Monday
• More times...

4. Select which times you'd prefer. Maybe even rank order them. The rest are hidden behind the "more..." link.

5. Write a note to your invitees.

• All negotiations are done in a "conversation" attached to the event.
• No separate emails are generated.
• Everyone can see everyone else's comments.
• The organizer of the meeting is not unduly laden with the responsibility of coordinating everybody's personal scheduling quirks: ie. Tom can make it next Tuesday but not Wednesday, but Joyce said anytime on Wednesday was good for her, but didn't explicitly Tuesday wasn't an option.

Usage Scenarios

What are some scenarios where this kind of flexibility would be helpful?

1. Picking a good weekend for company events such as the holiday party and the company picnic.
2. Coordinating who brings what to a potluck.
3. Scheduling a lunch with a friend, non-critical, but you'd like to see them soon.

More advanced scenarios

Can we briefly think about some cases where that wouldn't work? Just as a thought exercise. (Not for 0.7 or 1.0 really).

For example, it would hard to coordinate with just unstructured conversation text, if you had a group that was much larger than say 20-30 people. What would be compelling scenarios for why someone might negotiate event for more than 20-30 people.

Usually such large group meetings are done by fiat: This is when the staff meeting will happen. Clear your schedules. OR

Full-participation is non-critical: I'm having a party, it'd be great if you could come

But I could see more structured means for prioritizing and selecting times to be useful if you were coordinating shift schedules.

ie. A restaurant, front-desk reception, news rooms, customer support, hospitals, class schedules, the police!

So for any given week, people can put down their 1,2,3,4th choices for what shifts they would like to work.

The wrinkles here of course are that:

1. Each person and perhaps each shift might require different durations. (ie. Oftentimes morning shifts are shorter than night shifts.)

2. How would you deal with people working multiple shifts a week? In that case, it might look more like this:

• First choice is Tuesday from 9-2PM and Thursday from 4-8PM
• Second choice is Monday from 10-noon, and Thursday from 4-8PM etc etc...

• Perhaps each person is represented by a separate "recurring" event with custom recurrences?
• 1, 2, 3rd choice are reflected on each recurrence on the calendar.
• All events appear on the calendar as "tentative".

By overlaying everybody's "available times" with their choice rankings, you can more easily see what the optimal shift schedule might be that will make everyone happiest.

Has anyone done this kind of highly complex shift scheduling before? What are some other scenarios where more structured date/time preferences would be helpful?

Proposals

• Invitations: a first draft of a GUI of an Invitation