Most of us are familiar with the pain and grief of trying to find suitable dates and times for meetings. \u00a0The process usually starts with an email like this:
\n—————
\nTo: Sue, Alec, Mandy, Karen, Pete
\nFrom: James
\nSubject: Project planning meeting<\/p>\n
Hi Guys
\nWe need to get together. Which of these dates & times suit you?
\nTue 6 at 3
\nWeb 7 at 10 or 4
\nThu 8 at 9.30 or 11
\nFri 9 at 3
\nRegards
\nJames
\n————–<\/p>\n
Sue, Alec and the others reply by email and their replies land in James’ inbox, fighting for attention amongst all the other messages, newsletters and junk. James has to keep track of the replies, tabulate the data to find the optimal date and time, and then email the date to the others.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has gone through this rigmarole knows how time consuming and frustrating it is. \u00a0Yet the web offers many simple and free tools to take the pain out of this chore: for example Doodle www.doodle.com<\/a>; AgreeaDate\u00a0www.agreeadate.com<\/a>; Meet-o-Matic www.meetomatic.com<\/a><\/p>\n The alternative and easier route for James would be to go to Doodle.com, enter dates and times into a table and send his invitees\u00a0a link to the table. They simply enter their name and mark the dates and times that are suitable. James checks Doodle at his convenience and can see at a glance the best time for meeting. \u00a0Doodle does all the tedious tabulation and calculation, saving\u00a0everyone time and hassle:\u00a0a great example of making the web work for you.<\/p>\n OK, so Outlook can do a lot of this. But what happens when you want to invite people outside your organisation who don’t share your Outlook calendar? Or when the meeting organiser is outside your organisation?<\/p>\n In spite of the potential to improve productivity, the data manager in one Scottish local authority explained the reason for blocking access to Doodle:<\/p>\n Doodle is categorised as ‘personal network storage’. We block all items in this category to prevent potentially damaging data leakage and DP [data protection] breaches as a matter of policy. The doodle site potentially exposes our internal mailserver to unknown third parties with whom we have no formal data sharing agreements. If you wish to share diaries then I’d suggest speaking to IT Support to see what can be arranged internally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, we don’t live in a risk free world and I can’t help wondering if Doodle and the like do in fact pose a real and serious risk of data leakage or breaching data protection law.\u00a0Would technical resources and expertise not be better deployed encouraging and supporting staff to exploit the potential of simple, cheap and effective web-based tools\u00a0rather than developing internal solutions? The\u00a0Christie Commission<\/a>\u00a0seems to suggest that this option at least\u00a0ought to be considered:<\/p>\n …the public sector, at all levels, can do more to transform how it procures, manages and uses digital technology to drive better public service delivery. We need to ensure that services are tailored to meet the needs of individuals and communities \u2013 exploiting the full potential of ICT will be critical in achieving this transformation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of us are familiar with the pain and grief of trying to find suitable dates and times for meetings. \u00a0The process usually starts with an email like this: ————— To: Sue, Alec, Mandy, Karen, Pete From: James Subject: Project planning meeting Hi Guys We need to get together. Which of these dates & times… Read More »The danger of Doodle<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6339,6337,6338,6324],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}