Idea for events’ toolkit
From last ABN fun event: support ad-hoc organising of ticket swap to make groups.
I’m collecting ideas on the ground of “organisation of events”. Problems that arise when you want to organize something, like a week-long boat trip with different people, or a diving week in Egypt with a club, or team outing, or when you appear on an event with friends and organizers missed some organizational parts.
A little bit more in details
Week-long sailboat trip
If you’re a captain of the ship and you need to collect your crew in a distant city (in Stokholm) at particular (part of the) day. And they all come from different places. But some can intersect and maybe give a lift. It would be nice to have a trip planner site/app where you register everyone and then keep the plan, so everyone stay informed on changes and delays. They can register their flights and trains and even share car tracks and ETAs. There you can plan meals with coulinary choices/allergies.
Diving week with club
For the second year I’m suffering from filling-in different sparce PDF files, which are provided in different times over 3 months (from December to March). They are also in Dutch and the checklist is made in a word with messed-up list indentations, making it event more painful. It would be nice to have a site where an even organizer make a plan what documents and in what times must be collected and then register all attendies so they see their personal completion progress and description per each step what needs to be uploaded, what form needs to be downloaded and filled in an uploaded back. And then such site can compile one PDF with results and give a download link to the organizer, etc. Plus he can follow the progress of all the members and nag them via different means, like emails, whatsapp, etc.
Messed up events
Actually the origins of this post are the ABN fun day event, where organizers made ad-hoc registration for go-karts (and lazer tag) in two queues, where you’ll get your anonymous ticket with a run time. That ended up with different teams and colleagues being placed in different run times, lowering the fun as you race with 10 people you don’t know and you don’t have fun on the track or in the shooting. It would be nice to have a simple site that allows you to register your ticket (your name and time) and make a named group where you want to collect your friends. Then you share the link to this event across as many people around you as you can, if they register too and make their groups or join to the groups of their friends, then all these users can see in realtime with whom they need to swap tickets to complete the puzzle and have fun with their friends.
Yachts assignments
And the last one (I think): imagine a local sailing comunity that parties 2 times a year for “openning” and “(not) closing” the navigation season. They register for the event and organizer will rent sailboats upfront according the increasing amount of registrations. Then last week he sits down at the table and starts completing the puzzle: some people can be a captain, some can be a competent crew, some would like to practice as a captain but they ask for a skilled captain to be in the crew just for the peace of mind, some ask not to appear with small kids, some have allergies for dogs, etc…
That organizer was already asking us to design a service or an app to help him do the assignments (see this), and I made a good PoC for it 2 years ago https://github.com/polvetra-rnd/consatisfaction. But it had only one real-life test and didn’t succeed (due to faulty input data, IMHO). So it could be revised and made as a service (see https://github.com/aleksandr-vin/polvetra.club).