Every time we travel with my friends we use the best travel planning software ever: a spreadsheet. It's the only tool that can bring together all the features you need, while giving you the flexibility of having your own organization:
- maybe you want to list everything in one sheet, maybe you want to split the "established" and the "ideas" in different sheets
- thanks to the beauty that is the Web, if something looks interesting, or you need to keep a tab on flight prices, you can just put a link to the resource with some comments. Include the link to the PDF of a 2-day excursion if you want. Add photos. Anything, really.
- if you need to vote, everyone can just put their names in front of the proposals
- with Google Docs you can even edit the same doc simultaneously and there is one single link that always point to the latest version
I do agree with the fundamental insight of TFA: if you're only going to use it once or twice a year, you don't want to take days getting familiar with the tool only to forget about it the moment you come back. And as a developer/PM you can't have every single use case prepared.
Sometimes it's better to just let people self-organize instead of trying to sell them something that's not better for them.
>you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
There's no way I'm turning kids loose on a spreadsheet to tally their votes for a Disney vacation.
I didn't include that kind of users, because I'm not travelling with them. Just like you I wouldn't trust them with the main spreadsheet, but surely you can give them their own spreadsheet: they won't be participating in most decisions anyway, so it's not like you'll need to copy paste most of it
- maybe you want to list everything in one sheet, maybe you want to split the "established" and the "ideas" in different sheets
- thanks to the beauty that is the Web, if something looks interesting, or you need to keep a tab on flight prices, you can just put a link to the resource with some comments. Include the link to the PDF of a 2-day excursion if you want. Add photos. Anything, really.
- if you need to vote, everyone can just put their names in front of the proposals
- with Google Docs you can even edit the same doc simultaneously and there is one single link that always point to the latest version
I do agree with the fundamental insight of TFA: if you're only going to use it once or twice a year, you don't want to take days getting familiar with the tool only to forget about it the moment you come back. And as a developer/PM you can't have every single use case prepared.
Sometimes it's better to just let people self-organize instead of trying to sell them something that's not better for them.