It has been my experience that finding a meeting room at a company can be next to impossible. All of the rooms are booked all of the time. This has two effects:
1) More meetings are held virtually, which is less effective IMHO.
2) Groups waste lots of time walking around looking for space.

It is my contention that meeting rooms, despite being perpetually reserved, are in fact underutilized:
-Recurring meetings are canceled at the last minute.
-Recurring reservations are made with no intention of actually meeting every week.
-Meetings take far less time than scheduled.
-Users book rooms that are larger than they need.
-etc.

My idea is to optimize the meeting room reservation system for just-in-time fulfillment. Here's how it would work:
1) When you schedule a meeting, you request a meeting room near your location. No room is assigned at this time.
2) 10 minutes before the meeting starts, the system locates a room based on location and the number of confirmed in-person attendees.
3) The systems sends a text message to all attendees, giving the location of the meeting.

Additionally, users could text the system to request an impromptu room for X people near their current location (using the phone's GPS location if possible).

Pre-reservation of rooms would be disallowed except for very large groups, such as all-hands meetings, or meetings requiring special equipment. Pre-reserving would require elevated permissions.

To prevent rooms from remaining reserved after a meeting has ended early, the system offers two mechanisms:
a) Users can text the system when their meeting ends to free up the resource.
b) Rooms are reserved for 15 minutes by default. A text message informs the user when their reservation is about to expire. The user can respond to extend it.
-- drzeus, Oct 24 2008

Where the hell do you work? The Pentagon? Just schedule the meeting at a local bar. Get more done, have more fun.
-- MauiChuck, Oct 24 2008


All Borg are continuously connected by a high-speed encrypted subspace data network.

For allocating meeting rooms, we've gone to that numbered ticket system they have at supermarket counters............
-- 8th of 7, Oct 27 2008


We significantly shortened the length of our meetings by all talking at once. But it's OK cause nobody listens anyway. Try it, it works.
-- theGem, Oct 27 2008


[+], although my office has only one meeting room! But good idea.
-- jetgrrl, Oct 28 2008


All scheduling systems are irrelevant, since the owner overrides them at his whim.
-- normzone, Oct 28 2008


Nice come back, [Ian].
-- blissmiss, Oct 28 2008



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