Everyone who's ever organized a meeting, event, social, dinner, videonight or any activity with more than a handful of people attending knows firsthand the horrors of picking a date at which at least a reasonable amount of people will actually be able to be there. Flurries of emails shooting back- and forth, proposals for alternatives, people who only reply once a week, and the most probable date for the event always heading backwards in time. It takes a lot of motivational power, patience, and above all time from the person organizing the event to wrestle his way through this and see the event actually come to pass.
Me, I'm too lazy for all that. I don't want to go and continuously match up "maybe"'s and "probably"'s and "definitely can't make it"'s and have a mental map of two dozen different weekends with lists of names of who can and can't attend at each of those times.
So when back in August 2002 I was
organizing a dinner with a group of friends, I wrote this deceptively simple web based tool. No frills,
but simply a list of dates for an event, for which people can quickly denote that they will be able to
attend, don't know yet, or won't be able to come.
And everyone stays updated on when everyone else can come, so that anticipating the most likely date for
the event becomes simple. It's not overly innovative, it's not really high-tech. But it works, and it's
useful. And with lots of events and activities looming on the horizon, I've expanded the planner a
bit.
Unfortunately with this becoming a public tool, I've had to add authentication so no one can go and mess up other events, and that requires people to register, but I've tried to make the process as painless as possible. (Additionally, if you already have registered at juima.org, you can use the same username and password to log in for this.)
Feel free to use the planner for helping you out with any events you are trying to schedule - the process for creating events should be self-explanatory (once you've logged in that is).