3 ms·
Ask HN: What's the best way to help 2 people agree on a recurring meeting time?
I've been dealing with this challenge for a while and have decided to open it to the HN community.
Context: I'm trying to make online learning more supportive by using synchronous collaboration. People sign up to a course, get a partner assigned, they agree on recurring meeting times, and they meet always at the same time to work on a project (e.g. they build a REST API doing remote pair programming). The "recurring" part is the key since this is what reduces dropouts (i.e. you have a person holding you accountable).
Problem: it's incredibly hard to help two people agree on a recurring meeting schedule when you don't have a large number of users.
Imperfect solution #1: People sign up to a pre-defined schedule (e.g. Tue & Thu 6pm - 9pm). This lacks flexibility and it doesn't work well with multiple time zones.
Imperfect solution #2: You ask people for timezone and how many times per week they want to meet and you assign them to someone in a similar timezone and let them agree on meeting times via email. This requires a lot of back and forth via email, some people are not super responsive, etc. This is very flexible and maximizes the chances of people agreeing on a meeting time.
Imperfect solution #3: People sign up and select meeting preferences (number of days per week, preferred days, preferred times, etc.) and, using an algorithm, you match people with similar preferences. This lacks some flexibility because someone people might be open to times other than the "ideal" ones they have selected. This also works really week with scale, but not so well with less than 100 users per course.
Imperfect solution #3.1: Same as the previous one, but you show users "schedule preferences" of available users so they can select them and they get assigned to that person automatically.
What would you do to maximize the chances of getting two people to agree on recurring meeting times and to reduce the back and forth in the conversation at the same time?
- throwmeaway32 9y agoKinda like #3s : I like the doodle approach (http://doodle.com/ http://doodle.com/), and expand it to work out recurring meetings as needed. Only problem is getting people to fill in all the data required to make it work.
- arielcamus 9y agoYes, the problem with Doodle is that it's incredibly inefficient to select a lot of different available slots of time. It also forces you to make a selection for specific dates. I need something that allows you to select your weekly availability (Mon-Sun) without asking for specific dates.
- itamarst 9y agoThey can just talk in person or on the phone?
- arielcamus 9y agoThat would be great. I am sure they would agree on a recurring meeting schedule pretty quickly. The problem is that our courses are remote/online, so they need to agree on a meeting time to do a video conference or call so they can talk to discuss their schedule preference. I was thinking of putting them in contact using text messages since people are more responsive that way. They could even decide to make a quick phone call. Unfortunately, I have students in more than 30 different countries and sometimes they would need to make an international phone call. I have also tried inviting them to our Slack team and introducing them to each other so they can do online calls. But people who are not used to using Slack yet tend to not be very responsive, so the back and forth takes forever and people get frustrated in the process.
- mvpu 9y agoI'd go with #3. In the first session, they'll figure out if there's a better time and stick to it. Just get them to start in a simple way.