Calendar

The lab runs its own scheduling service at cal.nuilab.org (opens in new tab) . You publish the times you’re free; other people open a link, pick a slot, and it’s booked. No back-and-forth email, and nothing goes through an outside company.

It is the same idea as Calendly, except the lab hosts it, so participant names and emails stay on lab machines. The software is calrs, an open-source scheduler.

Who signs in, and who doesn’t

You sign in to set up your times and manage bookings. The person booking with you does not — they open your link, pick a time, and type their name and email. That is the whole point: study participants, visitors, and students never need an account.

There is no self-signup. Accounts are given out on request, so if you need to publish your own booking page, ask Francisco. Once you have access, sign in at cal.nuilab.org (opens in new tab) and choose Sign in with NUILab — the same lab account you use everywhere else.

The four things to set up

Work through these in order. The first two are once-only; after that you mostly just create a booking page per thing you offer.

1. Your availability — your timezone, the hours you’re willing to be booked, and connecting your real calendar so it blocks slots automatically.
2. Booking pages — one per kind of meeting or session: a 30-minute advising slot, a 90-minute VR study session, a thesis defense practice.
3. Sharing your link — public, lab-only, or invite-only, plus putting a booking widget on a recruitment page.
4. Managing bookings — approving, rescheduling, and cancelling once people start booking.

Running a study is the case this page gets used for most, and it has its own page: Running study sessions .

Words the app uses

• Event type — one bookable thing you offer. It carries the duration, the location, and the rules. Your booking link points at an event type.
• Booking — one person’s reserved slot on an event type.
• Availability — your weekly hours, plus overrides for specific dates.
• Source — a calendar you connect so its existing events block your slots.
• Resource — a shared thing that can only be in one place at a time, like a room or a headset, so two bookings can’t claim it at once.

What arrives by email. When someone books, they get a confirmation with a calendar invitation attached, and you get a notification. Approvals, declines, cancellations, reschedules and reminders are all emailed too. Mail is sent from noreply@nuilab.org, so tell participants to check their spam folder the first time, and note that replies to that address go nowhere — put your own contact details in the booking page description.