The situation is familiar.  Each day at around 11:45 AM, in anticipation for lunch, a hungry employee begins his rounds in the office (‘his’- you know who you are).  The question is simple, but the decision can make or break your day.

If you read our blog, particularly the entry “Excerpts from an Office Manager’s Diary”, you know that we have a hard time deciding where to eat.  There is a clear policy that we eat together, but we definitely can’t decide on what kind of food.  We have vegetarians and want-to-be vegetarians, carnivores, health freaks and everything in between.  Moreover we are on Rothchild Blvd., one of the culinary hubs of Tel Aviv and just have too much to choose from (as we say in Hebrew ‘a Rich person’s problem, but really too many choices can be very overwhelming). 

This is a very real problem that affects many companies in our neighborhood and very likely any company which is located in a place with a lot of choice for dinning out.  In our company challenges that affect our everyday lives serve as an inspiration for genius.  It didn’t take much time for our ninjas to create an application which helped us solve our daily ‘where to eat dilemma’ in an efficient and democratic way.  As this problem was acute and was becoming an existential threat, they quickly set out to define an MVP (minimal viable product) which would prove to be an extremely useful concept.

The application is quite simple.  We created a comprehensive list of restaurants in the area and divided them into categories by types of cuisine.  The system then generates a daily lottery, which randomly chooses 5 options from the 5 different cuisine categories.  At exactly 11:00 AM each day, an email is sent to all employees.  Employees then have until 12:00 PM to vote on their top choice (or indicate that s/he is not going to be joining everyone for lunch).  When the vote closes, the system tallies the votes and then sends an email with the restaurant which received the most number of votes.

As time went on, additional features were added, including a system which gave additional weight to an employee’s vote whose restaurant of choice was not chosen the day before.  This caused corruption and it was soon discovered that people were voting for restaurants that they didn’t particularly want to eat at in order to improve their chances of winning the following day.  What kind of mechanisms would you have added in order to make sure that such corruption doesn’t occur?

 “Lunch Time” is the end result and while it is no longer in use, this venture enjoyed success and popularity among the employees of The Gifts Project for a distinguished period in the company’s history.

But this doesn't have to be the end of it. We developed this app using open source code and you are more than welcome to grab the code and revive it. We are very happy to hand you the code for any public use. Feel free to say hi@giftsproject.com.  

The Gifts Project R&D team and other contributors.