I am looking for a simple online tool that will allow members of a group to indicate whether they will be coming to repeating events (rehearsals, meetings, events, etc). Evite is overkill and difficult to manage for the purpose I’m seeking- ideally folks would be able to go to a page for the group, view a list of upcoming events, and quickly indicate whether they can make it in a way that is viewable to all members of the group.
Some things that would help:
No need for people to register for a new service to use it.
Possibly leave comments along with responses?
Ability to schedule repeating events and one-time events
I know that it seems like evite will do all of this, but it ends up being cumbersome - I would love a 37signals approach to something like this, and it annoys me somewhat that google groups doesn’t have this feature.
Have you thought about google docs, or google calendar? You can set up a spreadsheet on google docs, and make it editable by all. You could also set up a calendar on google docs, but that might not work too well for people leaving comments, nor would it work too well for several people to indicate they can or cannot attend a meeting (I don’t think).
A quick google search for “meeting scheduler” gave me a couple of results that could meet your needs (I didn’t really look into any of them, though; I’ll leave that to you!) They all seem to be free, at first glance: