Doodles and Games

Sadly, as a part of my job, I have to arrange meetings with groups of people. Often these meetings are ad hoc, outside the run of normal departmental business, and so it can become a tricky problem of social coordination as we try to find shared interstices in the academic calendar. To save multiple emailing I use freely available scheduling software.  This enables me to establish a set of dates and times when I am definitely available and then I can email a link to colleagues for them to seek out and mark common slots.  This shifts the problem from one of multiple private correspondence and central control to one of public decision making.

What responses might receipt of a scheduling email elicit?

There is plenty to think about here, and it would make a fun project to work this out properly and formally. Maybe someone has. It would surprise me if the software developers had not. But here are some thoughts to get things started.

1) Being a first mover - i.e. the first to respond to a scheduling request - carries implications. For example, one could use that as an opportunity to narrow the time window by only opting for a small number of slots from the proffered array. (I am guessing the actual number of slots will matter here, as will the number of people invited. The latter variable is not always known.)  In doing this one might assume that the following responders will then only choose from among your choices, or they will make very few choices outside of your own.  Indeed, if the next person to choose made more than a certain threshold amount of choices outside of your own you would have reason to think that they either did not want the meeting to go ahead, or they did not want to attend the meeting with you.

2) Being a last mover - i.e. the last to respond to the request - would mean that you could look at all the previous decisions and then effectively choose only one slot that best suited you.  You could either do this with due reference to the aims of the meeting organizer, choosing a slot where all invitees can attend. Or, you could ruthlessly choose a slot that ensured only the people you wanted to attend could.  If the meeting is pressing, and if time invested in organizing the meeting is to be limited, this might mean that some sort of normative rule - a quorate rule, for instance - might then be instated by the meeting organizer.

3) The number of responses given will have implications.  Sometimes the organizer will give guidance on this in the cover note.  For example, she may ask all the respondents to find at least three slots from those presented.  But under a free choice scenario, choosing just one slot can impose certain constraints, as we have seen in 2.  But, it is also a statement of just how busy one is.  A large array of choices, for example at least one time each working day of a month, might cause some social anxiety.  There might be a threshold number of responses that is deemed acceptable, indicating reasonable degrees of freedom as well as a desire to cooperate, whilst also demonstrating a full schedule and serious commitment to other tasks within the institution.  Being busy has currency separate to anything that might be produced.  Effort is valued.

4) It is possible that experience of organizing meetings with this software will increase awareness of the various strategies and this will impact upon the structure of any proffered schedule.  Moreover, some organizers may collect information about timetabled commitments etc. before constructing their schedule such that they choose dates and times they know will be difficult for particular members of a committee.  In this way they engineer, perhaps via quorate rules, a favourable group.  However, because the final decision is public any excluded member has the opportunity to rearrange their diary and attend. In this way such public coordination defends certain democratic virtues.

5) An astute manager would note the pattern of responses from colleagues across time to scheduling requests as this information could covary with other aspects of performance.

6) Handing over diary responsibility and scheduling to an administrator will change aspects of the above.  At the very least it will make the manager more resistant to claims of manipulation around attendance at meetings.