One problem with swapcard is it is sequential. When I agree to a meeting with someone, we agree a time, even though there might be many slots that work for both of us. Later, I might want to meet with someone else, but the only slot that would work is the one I frivolously wasted earlier.
An alternative to this would be for people to set their general availability, declare bilateral meeting intentions (maybe with prioritization), and then for an algorithm to automatically assign people to timeslots and meeting locations in order to maximise connections and minimise overcrowding.
What should happen if I now want to also meet with someone else? Do my existing meetings get rescheduled? It seems to me that would cause people’s timetables to be unpredictable, which will have annoying consequences like “The people from my uni group decided to have dinner together at 19:00 because that’s when everyone happened to be free and now I can’t make it”, or any other thing that’s not on the app.
You’d be required to immediately update any time you want to block because you have no manual control.
In the weeks leading up to the conference you enter the meetings you want to have, and block off your dinner date. Then at 1am on the morning of the conference the schedules are all set. You are correct that this does not work well if you want to schedule new meetings after the sorting hat has done its thing.
This piqued my curiosity, so I looked into it — it seems that there’s a pretty equal split between pre-conference meetings scheduled (2449) and during-conference meetings scheduled (2039), with meeting confirmation frequency peaking on the Friday of the event. This is just EA Global: Boston 2023 data and I haven’t looked at the others — but it does indicate to me that we don’t want to set up systems that favour one type of user and disadvantaging another.
One problem with swapcard is it is sequential. When I agree to a meeting with someone, we agree a time, even though there might be many slots that work for both of us. Later, I might want to meet with someone else, but the only slot that would work is the one I frivolously wasted earlier.
An alternative to this would be for people to set their general availability, declare bilateral meeting intentions (maybe with prioritization), and then for an algorithm to automatically assign people to timeslots and meeting locations in order to maximise connections and minimise overcrowding.
What should happen if I now want to also meet with someone else? Do my existing meetings get rescheduled? It seems to me that would cause people’s timetables to be unpredictable, which will have annoying consequences like “The people from my uni group decided to have dinner together at 19:00 because that’s when everyone happened to be free and now I can’t make it”, or any other thing that’s not on the app.
You’d be required to immediately update any time you want to block because you have no manual control.
In the weeks leading up to the conference you enter the meetings you want to have, and block off your dinner date. Then at 1am on the morning of the conference the schedules are all set. You are correct that this does not work well if you want to schedule new meetings after the sorting hat has done its thing.
I don’t know what the statistics are, but personally when I went to conferences most of my meetings were set after the conference had already started.
This piqued my curiosity, so I looked into it — it seems that there’s a pretty equal split between pre-conference meetings scheduled (2449) and during-conference meetings scheduled (2039), with meeting confirmation frequency peaking on the Friday of the event. This is just EA Global: Boston 2023 data and I haven’t looked at the others — but it does indicate to me that we don’t want to set up systems that favour one type of user and disadvantaging another.