Sometimes you want to "mix people up" using small-group activities or "breakout sessions." To give everyone maximum exposure to the others in an intimate setting, you schedule multiple rounds of breakouts where no two people land in multiple breakouts together. In other words, every participant meets all new people in every breakout. The desire for well-mixed breakouts comes up in networking events, seminars, corporate team-building efforts, and the classroom.
This tool takes advantage of tabulated exact solutions to the "Social Golfer Problem" (SGP) from combinatorics to schedule these breakouts. You put in a list of people and get out a PDF schedule of the breakouts.
The tabulated SGP solutions support the following ranges of individuals:
- 5-16 people in groups of 2
- 7-27 people in groups of 3
- 9-32 people in groups of 4
If the number of people isn't a multiple of the group size, some groups will be smaller. For example, breaking an odd number of people into pairs means that someone is going to be alone in each round. This tool handles this issue automatically.
The system requirements are a UNIX-like environment with Python 3 and Pandoc.
Your event has the 19 attendees (these are fake names) listed in example.csv.
You want to organize breakouts of up to 4 people (you'd need 16 or 20 to have
everyone in groups of exactly 4, so one group will need to be short a person).
You have the time for 3 breakouts.
Clone this repo. Then run the tool like this:
./make_schedule.py example.csv 4 3 | pandoc -o example.pdf
example.pdf contains the schedule. You can view with a system viewer or print
it out for your event plans.