This Google Apps Script randomly assigns lunch groups by creating Google Calendar invites for each group. The groups are chosen by selecting people who are not on the same team, and did not have lunch together the last time the script ran.
At Knewton, we run this script run once a week. It is an individual's choice to participate, and most do. All parts of the organization are involved. It is a fun and successful way to continue innovation and sharing of ideas.
Each participant enters their email and "team" into the spreadsheet. Ideally, the teams should be specific and refer to the people one most frequently interacts with. The script keeps track of the group each participant went to lunch with last time the script was ran. Note: If the script can find no one not in the same team, and who did not eat together last week, the script will still make a group.
- Create a Google Spreadsheet. The first row will be headers. Put the following entries in the first row: Timestamp, Email, Team, Last Lunch.
- Ask participants to fill out the Email and Team fields (perhaps use a form for this).
- Paste the
script.jsfile into a new Google Apps Script document. - Replace the
SPREADSHEET_IDvariable in script.js with the id of the spreadsheet created in step 1. This id (at the time of this writing) is found in theGETparamkey, e.g.https://docs.google.com/a/knewton.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=SPREADSHEET_ID#gid=0 - Run it! Run the function
main(). Note that the calendar invites will be owned by the user who runs the script. Pro tip: create a new account to run the script so as to avoid an account with lots of calendar invites that say "random lunch". - Use a Time Trigger to run the script on a recurring basis.