As teams of people increasingly work in distributed locations, it’s becoming harder to coordinate face to face activities.
Even organising a brief team-building lunch in advance can turn into a planning task more akin to hosting a UN convention.
Lots of software exists to arrange meetings by specifying the possible dates and then maximising the number of participants available on the day. Today’s invention is a program which hunts for impromptu opportunities (at less than a day’s notice).
It constantly searches a shared online calendar system for spaces in which every member of a small team is ‘free’ and, subject to a set maximum frequency for such events, proposes a shared coffee or lunch break to all concerned.
This can be used to provide people with a source of pleasant surprises at work (as opposed to the drudgery of formal meeting arrangements).