Archive:Pick a meeting time

Goal
If you want to pick a meeting time, follow these steps.

These are loosely based on the Bay Area Debian shotgun rules for organizing meetings. Since you're organizing the meeting, you have to be there.

Email the list and ask when people can make it
Here's what you do:


 * 1) Figure out some times that work for you.
 * 2) Create a poll on doodle.com or whenisgood.com that will let people say when they can come.
 * 3) Optional, but good: Decide on the objective of the meeting, to motivate people to attend. (See also this tutorial on organizing meetings.)
 * 4) In your mind, set a deadline for the date you're going to pick the meeting time.
 * 5) Email the poll information (including the poll administrative information) to the webteam list.

Sample time poll email
From: LC  To: webteam at freeculture.org Subject: Meeting planning: Pick a date

We need to pick a meeting time for the Web Team meeting. So here's a poll link:

http://example.com/poll-link

And here's a link to the admin interface for the poll, so we can all see each other's answers:

http://example.com/poll-admin-link

We're going to choose the meeting by Tuesday, January 3, 1987. I'll make a decision based on what people say in the poll.

(Optional: The meeting's purpose is to decide how we can frob the fibnitzer. We will write up a full agenda once we've picked the date.)

Let us know if you can make it by filling out the poll!

Sincerely,

L. Cohen

Decide what time the meeting will happen, and make an agenda page
I suggest using e.g. Google Calendar to send you an email or SMS to remind you to actually pick the meeting time. I often forget to actually do that on time.

Then create a wiki page with the name being the ISO-format date (e.g., 2009-12-31) and give it "Category:Meeting".

Oh, and create a time zone converter link. To do that using timeanddate.com:


 * 1) Enter the time and date of the meeting into http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html
 * 2) Leave the target time zone field set to "UTC"
 * 3) Click "Convert time"
 * 4) Then click "Make changes to the current search"
 * 5) Copy that link, and send it out with the email.

Email everyone saying when the the meeting is
Here's a sample email:

From: LC  To: webteam at freeculture.org Subject: Meeting on 1992-11-12, 5 PM US/Eastern

Okay, everybody, we're having a meeting on IRC!

Where: #freeculture (on freenode) When: Thursday, Nov 12, 1992 5 PM US/Eastern

Convert to your time zone: http://example.com/link-from-time-and-date.com Let us know if you can make it by filling out the poll!

We're growing an agenda at http://wiki.freeculture.org/1992-11-12

Sincerely,

L. Cohen