Thing 11: Oodles of Doodle
Thing 11 is a nifty tool called Doodle which lets you find out when people are free to meet up. I decided to try it out to organise a lunch date and found it really easy to set up. You can choose date and time options and then can either let Doodle send out an invitation or write one yourself (I chose this option). The people I sent it out to seemed to have no problems using the system (although one wrote a comment instead of using the poll which is a handy feature). The lunch date never happened because there wasn’t a time we were all free but the process itself worked well.
I would say that Doodle is probably more useful for larger groups meeting up, with just four people I did feel that I could have done it more easily over email. I can definitely see how it would be useful for large meetings, especially with those outside the organisation or people who don’t tend to use their Outlook calendar on the internal system. In fact, I have come across it before being used for just that – a meet up of Archivists from across different organisations so I will bear it in mind for future use.