SchellingBoard

A web app for managing event scheduling — attendees can propose sessions, vote on them, and view the final schedule. Built with Next.js and SQLite.

The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Schelling points — focal points that people naturally converge on without explicit coordination. SchellingBoard is the ironic opposite: a tool that enables explicit coordination. Attendees propose sessions and vote, creating a concrete consensus that wouldn't emerge on its own.

This is a public open-source fork of rachelweinberg12/scheduling-app. Rachel Weinberg, the original author, does not wish to maintain a public open-source project herself but agreed to this fork serving that role. See LICENSING_HISTORY.md for details.

Features

• Session proposals — attendees submit and browse session ideas
• Voting — attendees express interest (interested / maybe / skip) before the schedule is set
• Scheduling board — drag sessions onto a time/location grid
• Event phases — proposal, voting, and scheduling phases with configurable date ranges
• Multi-event support — host multiple events from one deployment
• Site password protection — optional single-password gate for the whole app

Deployment

The recommended way to self-host SchellingBoard is via Docker.

docker run -d \
  --name schellingboard \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -v schellingboard_data:/data \
  -e SITE_PASSWORD=changeme \
  -e AUTH_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) \
  schellingboard/schellingboard

Or with docker compose — copy docker-compose.yml from this repo and run:

SITE_PASSWORD=changeme AUTH_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) docker compose up -d

Environment variables

Variable	Required	Description
SITE_PASSWORD	No	Password gate for the whole site (leave unset to disable)
AUTH_SECRET	Yes	Secret key for session signing (use a random 32-byte hex string)
DATABASE_URL	No	SQLite path (default: file:/data/data.db)
HOST_PORT	No	Host port to bind (default: 3000, compose only)

Admin CLI

Events, guests, and locations are managed through an interactive CLI:

docker exec -it <container_name> scripts/admin.js

Event Phases

Events can progress through three optional phases:

Phase	What it enables
Proposal	Attendees submit and browse session proposals
Voting	Attendees vote on proposals (votes hidden from hosts until scheduling)
Scheduling	Hosts see vote counts and can place sessions on the schedule grid

Phase dates are set directly on the Event record in the database. If no dates are set, the app skips phases and goes straight to scheduling.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.txt and LICENSING_HISTORY.md.