How to schedule 100s of people online?

September 6, 2011 9:03 AM

I need to recruit 500+ people in NYC to come in to do a study in a hotel conference room. They'll be in groups of 10, in 1-hour sessions. What can I use to let them (a) schedule themselves and (b) change their own signups?

I do not want to have to talk to ANYONE - that doesn't scale to this number of people. I just want to post to craigslist with a URL and magically have them all schedule themselves into time blocks, with a built in limit of 10 people per session (after which nobody will be able to sign up for that time block any more).

Doodle doesn't work - the UI doesn't scale to that many people nor to that many sessions, and anyway there's no way to let people edit existing sessions without letting them edit and delete other people's sessions.

posted by dmd to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Google has appointment slots for Calendar. I just played around with it a bit and it looks like you might have to create 10 different events per time slot, which is annoying if you ask me because it will look really cluttered. But it is an option.
posted by theichibun at 9:08 AM on September 6, 2011

Response by poster: I don't want to require users to have a google account.
posted by dmd at 9:11 AM on September 6, 2011

Response by poster: In addition, that would horrifically confuse people - there would have to be 10 URLs, and they'd have to click through them to see which were free and which weren't.
posted by dmd at 9:13 AM on September 6, 2011

I didn't have to schedule the number of people you did, but when I had to do something similar in the past I used an something called TimeTrade. I was able to make do with their trial version, so not sure how the cost would work out for you. At least with the version I used, I simply had to provide people with a URL and then they went and picked a slot from one of the available time blocks. For the version I used they could not edit their sessions once they made an appointment, but they couldn't see or delete other people's sessions, either.

A search for appointment scheduling software will turn up more of this type of applications.
posted by needled at 9:22 AM on September 6, 2011

Signupgenius.com might work for this.
posted by Lulu's Pink Converse at 9:23 AM on September 6, 2011

genbook might work for this as well. Like timetrade, it's an online scheduling apointment system, where people can sign themselves into certain slots, they can't see other people who have signed up, they get an email reminder, etc.
posted by anitanita at 9:51 AM on September 6, 2011

Response by poster: http://www.timecenter.com seems to work well.
posted by dmd at 1:45 PM on September 6, 2011

You should use eventbrite. You can create one event with separate ticket types limited to 10 participants each, for each of the sessions. If the event is free, using the service is free.
posted by reddot at 8:10 AM on September 9, 2011