Meetwhen

Tools like BookingSG and CalSG are designed for one-way bookings, where one party publishes availability and others select a slot.

They work well when:

• An officer, service, or facility owns the calendar

• Availability is fixed and known upfront

• Participants simply choose what's available

However, public officers who regularly coordinate multi-stakeholder meetings told these tools do not work for their use cases:

• Meeting times depend on multiple people’s schedules

• Availability may not be not known upfront

To use booking tools in these situations, officers have to set up workarounds to simulate shared availability. The extra setup and steps involved make this more effort than it is worth.

🔓 Unlock time across public service by fixing a small but highly frequent friction at scale

Across government, thousands of stakeholder meetings happen every week — from family coaches coordinating family visits, to inter-agency task forces and policy discussions involving many organisations.

While each meeting may seem small, the scheduling effort often stretches over days or even weeks.

From our observations of real coordination conversations:

• A project steering committee meeting took 12 days to schedule

• A meeting between 4 different organisations took over 2 months to finalise

• A family coach takes 4 days to find a meeting time to visit their assigned families

In each case, the delay came from collecting and reconciling availability across multiple stakeholders.

Repeated across teams and agencies, this friction slows decisions, delays action, and adds significant coordination overhead. Reducing it unlocks time and momentum across the public service.

What we built

Over the last month, we built and shipped a live version of Meetwhen that supports quick and easy collection of meeting availability for multi-stakeholder meetings.

Meetwhen helps meeting organisers:

1. Reduce repeated back-and-forth by collecting availability once

2. Cut follow-up work by showing response status at a glance

3. Shorten time to fix a meeting by making overlaps and trade-offs clear

Key product and technical decisions

Several design and build decisions were driven by how meeting coordination actually works in government:

• Built for proxy responses (PAs and team reps)
  We designed the user experience to allow a public officer to submit availability on behalf of others.

• No authentication required for participants
  To remove a major adoption barrier, we chose not to require logins. Participants can access the link to submit their availability immediately — critical for meetings involving MoPs and external stakeholders.

• Mutable availability instead of fixed submissions
  We built support for editing availability after submission, recognising that schedules change and meetings are often adjusted to accommodate higher-level stakeholders. Availability is treated as provisional rather than final.

User testing

Meetwhen has been tested with public officers coordinating real or recent meetings with external stakeholders, including family coaches from MSF and a policy officer from MinLaw.

During testing:

• All participants completed the availability flow without guidance

• Participants rated their interest in adopting Meetwhen at 4–5 out of 5

• Feedback focused on usability improvements rather than questioning the need for the product

Going live

As a result of these tests:

• MSF family coaches have agreed to trial Meetwhen for upcoming meetings with families — they will be sharing the tool with 25 family coaches on 10 Feb

• People’s Association HR innovation team expressed strong interest in adopting Meetwhen in the next three months, conditional on adding support for bulk upload of time slots

At this stage, impact on time saved and reduced follow-ups has not yet been measured.

The upcoming MSF trial will validate whether Meetwhen reduces coordination effort in live use and whether participants, both citizens and external stakeholders, are willing to adopt the flow.