About Slate

Slate is an event coordination tool that compiles the calendars of participants to generate a table representing when the most participants can attend.

Slate will never reveal users' calendars or event details to users.

The initial version of Slate is the 2021-22 major project by Andrew Simonson.

In version 2.0 the project (now 2022-23 major project, also Andrew Simonson) gained a much improved UX, large performance improvements, Computer Science House service integration, and basic analytics. This iteration is the first I consider publishable (delivers on all base objectives and is user-friendly)

Although not initially inspired by the Where2Meet site, Slate is similar in many aspects and expands upon it via automated long-term data collection and more flexible use cases.

The source code for Slate and its further development can be found on Github.

A hypothetical Slate 3.0 feature wishlist:

• An optimized in-house calendar parser/availability handler, ideally in C (make it speedy)*
• More views, ie. output broken down by week (instead of just month)
• Stats. Always more stats.
• Time ranges. Basically ignoring early-morning and late-evening.
• Better error handling, especially for bad calendar

* Slate could be sped up by an order of magnitude by ditching icalendar dependencies in favor of {start-datetime, end-datetime} pairs for events. Unfortunately, icalendar (more specifically, the multiple types of recurring events) is also pretty scary.

Usage:

The example usage (in nav bar) shows a sample output. No work required :)

Every participant has three attributes, a Name, URL, and Score.

Name

Optional input, names the participant. Defaults to 'Unnamed ##'

URL

URLS are references to ics (iCalendar files) online. Most digital calendars use (or can export) ics calendars.

Google Calendar: Open calendar settings. Under 'Integrate Calendar', copy 'Public address in iCal format'. Depending on preferences, your calendar might need to be made public.

iCloud Calendars (iOS): in 'Edit Calendar', turn on 'Public Calendar' and share link.

Score

Scores determine the value of a participant's attendance. The higher the score, the worse it is when they cannot attend.

Scores of -1 indicate a mandatory attendance (aka the key speaker cannot make it or the room is not available) and such timeslots will be greyed out.

Participant types:

Member Accounts

If you are logged in, you can select members of your organization. This leaves only the score to be set.

Manually-Added

Participants without accounts can be added by their ics file urls.

Slate is spreadsheet friendly! If you have a list of URLS, names, or scores, paste them in divided by newlines and the URLs will automatically overflow into new participant inputs.