Doodle - lets vote on when to meet Tuesday, April 01, 2008
I came across Doodle this week, which offers a variant on meeting time planning. You nominate a series of dates/times and then invite participants to vote yes/no on the various times. The online service, which is free, highlights the most popular time amongst respondents.
Creating the meeting slots for people to choose from is very easy and entirely text based, thereby avoiding concerns about java or flash incompatibility problems that you can experience with some services.
The organiser emails invitees a link to the schedule from within their own email client, rather than from within the service, and invitees submit their votes for the meeting times shown.
Pros
- very simple to use for the organiser and invitee alike
- free
Cons
- I couldn't edit the times of the poll once released, even if it was prior to anyone participating in the vote
- it wasn't possible to hide the votes submitted from others. Whilst this isn't always necessary it might be required in some situations
- participants had to fill their name in when adding their vote, rather than receiving a personal link that would track who had voted and not. Obviously this would have added complexity to this very simple app, but saved much time for the organiser.
- allowing free format names to be entered by participants on submission opens up the possibility of confusing the organiser e.g. multiple John's invited who only enter their first name when voting
As such I will stick with Timetomeet, but Doodle represents the simplest solution I have seen to the problem.
Labels: meeting
posted by John Wilson @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link
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