Cohousing-L Mailing List: A work scheduling app for common meals: Got one? Want one?

[Ken Winter (kenatsun]

 Hello Cohousing-L ~

We have two questions about apps that support scheduling workers (cooks,
cleaners, etc) for common meals.  We'll pose our questions first, and then
explain them a bit.

   1. Does your community currently use a work scheduling app?  (It could
   be either a home-grown or a commercial app.)  If so, please tell us how
   our community can have a look at it.
   2. If your community doesn't have a work scheduling app, would you like
   to have one?

By "work scheduling", we mean the process of filling the roles that it
takes to produce each meal in a series of meals that you are organizing.

The scheduling task is basically this: Particular roles (cook,
cleaner, etc) need
to be filled for each meal. There's a pool of community members who are
potential workers. Each worker has constraints as to their availability and
preferences.  The task is to assign workers to all of those roles while
satisfying the constraints (and, thereby, satisfying the workers!).

A "scheduling app" basically helps you staff a series of meals by (1)
collecting the list of workers (usually from the community membership
list), (2) gathering their constraints (e.g. by taking a survey), (3)
generating a tentative set of assignments for all the meals in the series
that satisfies the worker constraints, and (4) facilitating the manual
revision of these assignments as change requests arise. Such an app can
drastically reduce the time and effort it takes to organize common meals,
and substantially improve the results.

(A *work *scheduling app is *not *the same thing as a *diners *sign-up app,
where people sign up to eat. There are robust apps, such as Gather
<http://info.gather.coop> and Mosaic <https://mosaicsoftware.org/>, that
handle diner sign-ups and much more. But they don't support worker
scheduling.)

We're asking you these questions now because we (Sunward and Great Oak, two
neighboring cohousing communities in Ann Arbor MI) have a home-grown
scheduling app that has served us well for over a decade. At this point,
we're considering reimplementing its functionality with a tidier internal
architecture and a more modern technology, so that developers other than
the two of us who wrote the current code (and who won't be around forever)
can take part in supporting and enhancing the app. Rewriting the app will
be a fair piece of work. So before we undertake it, we want to see if there
are any apps out there in coho-land that we might use instead - hence, our
first question. If nobody already has such an app, we want to see if other
communities might want to use (and help develop/support/improve) the 2.0
version of our app - hence, our second question.

~ Thanks in advance
~ Ken Winter (Sunward) and Willie Northway (Great Oak)