Meetable can now replace your Doodle polls! Meetable, my open source event listing website, now lets you propose an event with several possible dates/times. People vote on which one works for them, and the organizer can choose the best date from the votes later.
Up until now, every event in Meetable needed a date before it could be created. That works fine when the date is already known, but a lot of events start out as "we should do this, when can everyone make it?" That part of the planning had to happen somewhere else, in a poll or a chat thread, and then someone would create the event on the calendar once the date was decided. In the meantime, nobody browsing the calendar would know the event was being planned at all.
I was a little unsure of how best to add this since almost everything in Meetable is built around the event date. The home page sorts by it, the ics feeds need it, and even the permalink of the event is made from it. I also didn't want the calendar to end up full of events that are "maybe" happening, mixed in with events that are actually scheduled. So the goal was to support this without the proposals getting in the way of the regular calendar.
Here's how it works:
- Proposed events are off by default, and can be turned on in the site settings.
- Anyone who can create events can also propose one. There is a new "Propose an Event" option in the "Add Event" menu.
- It's the same form as creating a regular event, except instead of a date, you enter at least two possible dates. Times are optional, and you can give a date an end date to propose a multi-day event.
- Proposed events don't appear in the main event list, ics feeds, Discord notifications or search. Instead they're listed on a new "Proposed Events" page in the navigation, and there is a banner on the home page when any events are looking for a date.
- Anyone who is logged in can vote "Yes", "If need be" or "No" on each date. Votes are saved as soon as you click, and the profile photos of everyone who voted are shown with each answer so you can see who can make which date.
- The date with the most "yes" votes is marked as "Leading". (Ties are broken by the most "if need be" votes, then the fewest "no" votes.)
- When it's time to decide, anyone who can edit the event clicks "Schedule this date" next to one of the options. The event gets that date, shows up on the calendar at its normal permalink, and voting closes.
- The old proposed event URL redirects to the new permalink so that any links shared during the vote keep working.
- The poll is kept on the event page after the date is chosen, collapsed under a note like "The date was chosen from 4 proposed dates", so you can see how the decision was made.
- If you ask for a Zoom meeting when proposing the event, the meeting is scheduled once the date is chosen, since there is no time to schedule it for until then.
- If you edit the proposed dates later, votes are kept for the dates that didn't change. Removing or changing a date removes its votes, since those votes were for a different date.
There is currently no deadline for voting and no reminder sent to the organizer, so a proposed event will sit there until someone chooses a date or deletes it. I'd like to see how this gets used before adding anything more to it, so if a voting deadline or something like that would be useful for your community, let me know.
Hopefully this makes it easier to get events on the calendar earlier in the planning process! You can install your own copy of Meetable from the source code on GitHub.
