coffee_match.py

Copyright 2020 by Ben Cotton. Licensed under the copyleft-next license.

coffee_match is a tool to help remote teams develop social bonds by randomly sorting a provided roster into groups to have informal meetings. A "coffee coordinator" runs the script and sends out the matches. Then the matched people schedule a meeting among themselves to talk about whatever.

Usage

coffee_match reads the roster from a plain-text file, one line per participant.

coffee_match accepts the following options:

Option	Description
-h, --help	show this help message and exit
-f FILE, --file=FILE	The roster file to use
--remainder={skip,accept,merge}	How to deal with remainders (see below)
-s SIZE, --size=SIZE	The size of group to create

Remainders

Sometimes your team doesn't divide evenly by your group size. In this case, you have three options:

• "skip" (default): The remaining people don't get included in a match this time
• "accept": The last group will be smaller, and that's okay. (Note: if the final group is of size 1, we don't currently do anything about that. It's a risk you take)
• "merge": Make the last group bigger by adding all of the remaining people to it.

Requirements

coffee_match requires Python 3 with the following modules:

• optparse
• random
• sys

Contributing

Contributions to this project are accepted under the copyleft-next license. In other words, inbound equals outbound.

All contributors agree to abide by the Contributor Covenant. See code_of_conduct.md in this repo.