here comes COaTI!

so, we're spinning up for another COaTI program launching in a few months and concluding sometime next year from the looks of it.

COaTI is one of PTP's core training programs, and its a multi-session, multi-day extravaganza.  When we run COaTI, we bring together 15 organizations, as you can imagine, scheduling is. . . tricky.

Last year we started a decidedly low-tech system for scheduling that A) seems to be working, and B) is actually somewhat less work than calling back and forth between 15 organizations.

Here's what we do: 

1. I print out calendars for a 6 to 9 month span of time during which we'd like to schedule the COaTI sessions.
2. I PDF that calendar and send it out to the participants, with instructions to cross off days on which they can't attend a training, and a request to send it back to me.
3. Once I've got all the calendars, I merge the details back into a single calendar (using Outlook/iCal, recently Google Calendars because that makes it easy to share), and use the results of that merged calendar to pick dates. 

And as I said, the system is VERY low-tech, but so far, its worked better than anything else we've tried.