Idea for additional constraint expression

[ianbjacobs]

There was some confusion about what it meant to express time slot preferences for TPAC 2024 meetings. Given our experience, I'd like to contemplate enhancing the system for these three use cases:

• The user wants N specific slots.
• The user wants N slots but doesn't care which slots those are.
• The user wants N slots and proposes M > N options, any of which would work.

One idea is to enhance the UX to allow the user to provide an integer for the total number of desired slots (N). This could interact with checkboxes for slots as follows:

• N is blank, M slots are selected => The user wants all M slots.
• N is an integer, M = N slots are selected => Same as previous bullet.
• N is an integer, M = 0 slots are selected => The user wants N slots and any slots will work.
• N is an integer, M > N slots are selected => Any of the M slots would work but the user wants N slots.
• N is an integer, M < N slots are selected => The user wants all M slots as well as additional slots any time.

I'm not sure how common the last use case is. We might also consider it to be an error and we check with the user to confirm what they want.

One note on the scheduling algorithm: if M > N, then we run into the issue of deterministic choices. Maybe the M options could be randomly sorted using the same seed as the full scheduling algorithm. This would allow us to recreate the
same order of M slots when we reuse the same full scheduling seed.

This feature is not critical, because when we publish a draft schedule people say "Sorry, I only meant any of those slots would work for our 2 slots we need" and it's easy to delete sessions from a schedule. But it might improve scheduling to know in advance when the intention is "N of the following M slots".

Note: I am not proposing even more scheduling options like "This slot is really important to us; the others are not as important."