An article in c't prompted me to install an instance of Bitpoll, which is a scheduling service similar to Doodle. The general idea is that if you want to put on an event but don't quite know when, you use the service to generate a poll listing the possible dates and send a link to the poll to everyone you want to involve in the decision. People can then mark the times which are convenient (or inconvenient) to them, and you can use this information to decide on the actual date.

Bitpoll was developed by students in the computer science department of the University of Hamburg and graciously published as open-source software. It doesn't seem to have had an official release since 2020, but the available version seems to work. My instance of the code is at PinguCloud Polls, and being the lazy person that I am, I'm using a Docker container image which the project has published so I don't need to chase down all the dependencies of the code. Bitpoll is a Django-based project, which is nice because it allowed me to make a few tweaks (notably changing the privacy statement, which referred to the University of Hamburg, and adding the imprint). I've also restricted the ability to post new polls to registered users, and disabled the self-registration option, so if any of my friends or family would like to generate and publish their own polls on the service, feel free to drop me a line and I'll set you up – but the usual Russian spammers can stay under their rock.

Bitpoll allows polls for dates, for date/time combinations, and undated polls where you can simply gauge people's opinions about things. It tries to avoid collecting people's personal data (which is a major point of contention with commercial services like Doodle) – in fact, it is possible to have completely anonymous polls. I'm going to use this to try to find a date for our upcoming high school reunion; there's a big official event for the 40th anniversary of our final exams later this year, but I don't usually go to those. Instead we occasionally try to bring together the people we used to hang out with, in order to have a small event for just our group – and the last one of those was actually before the COVID-19 pandemic, so it's about time to try again. Let's see if the software helps!