Creating an in person networking experiment with AI

I augmented my last in person event with AI.

What would probably have taken me hours to figure out on my own, took me only 30 mins to figure out, test, and set up, thanks to ChatGPT. It involved only a few prompts/questions, and 1 line of tweaked code.

I don't use AI much yet but this was such a cool little use case, where it truly helped me save time, that I figured it'd be an interesting case study/example if you're looking for a real world example of how it has helped me.

Backtracking slightly: I was hosting a Tutti (visit www.tutti.space) community event and knew I was going to have a scavenger hunt there, as a sort of networking hack. It had worked really well at my wedding to introduce 60 guests to each other before the ceremony. But the wedding had been in a place where there was 0 reception, so everything was done offline: printed papers, people came to me when they were done.

For this company event I expected about 100 guests and I knew I’d be overwhelmed with people coming to me. We also had some incredible gifts offered by some very generous people & companies, but limited numbers of each gift (max 4). So I wanted to figure out some system that would:

• allow people to enter their contact details easily (without “registering” for anything)

• “purchase” a free gift, that we could run out of stock for

• Timestamp their entry.

• And protect the prize page with a very specific password so only people who had completed the hunt could figure it out.

My immediate thoughts went to Shopify or Squarespace. If we could create a shop store, with limited stock, and then make the price £0, that could be a way of doing it.

I spent about 30 mins testing that theory, but it became clear very quickly that it was far too complex for a system that people were supposed to fill out in seconds.

After coming to this conclusion, I personally thought maybe Google poll might make a good alternative but I wasn’t sure if there was any way of limiting options on there… I’d never heard of anyone doing so. 

After 5 mins of playing with Google poll and getting nowhere I turned to ChatGPT.

Prompt #1: I asked: “is there a website I can use to allow 100 people to choose items as prizes from a competition, with limits on number of prizes?”

It came back with 7 suggestions including:

• E-commerce platforms (Shopify)

• A custom app

• And importantly: “Google forms where each participant can choose a prize, and you can manually monitor and close options as they run out”

Prompt #2: I replied “google forms would be great but i can't manually monitor and close options…”

ChatGPT replied: “If you’re looking for an automated solution you can apply a script to a Google form” with a rough guide of how this would work, but nothing specific. 

Prompt #3: I replied: “can you provide the instructions and code for this?” (I’m quite polite to my AIs)

It responded with detailed instructions, along with a code snippet for the entire script I needed to augment my Google poll, as well as instructions on how to adjust the code to work for me.

After implementing the code and following the very simple instructions, everything looked good but the code wasn’t running... And Google wasn't giving me any useful errors or info as to why not.

So I scanned the code quickly and noticed this rather odd couple of lines:

The first line is referencing the Google poll by ID. The second line is referencing the linked Google sheet, but by Name, not ID. Had I been writing the code myself, I would have referenced both by ID as names can change. I tweaked that reference from “getSheetByName” to “openById”

So my new code looked like this:

With this tiny tweak, the code worked. 

I tested the poll by using a few different devices to fill it out simultaneously. IF I pressed submit at the exact same time, I could make it glitch. But given people needed to complete a very manual scavenger hunt to get to that point, I was confident that wouldn’t happen much (it didn’t). 

Another thing I wanted to figure out was how I could block people from accessing the prizes until they'd completed the hunt.

Prompt #5: I asked "Can I password protect the form?"

Again the system came back with a bunch of options, including "using a pre-form qualification question"

I asked for more info on that and it provided step by step guides to set up a question with response validation earlier in the form so only people with exactly the right word would be able to get in.

ChatGPT was helpful to remind me this was not hack proof but it was enough for a little fun game like this.

The final steps I took to set this system up were:

• Get ChatGPT to help me choose a word that would not be easy for most people to guess even if they had half the letters, that had something to do with creativity. Together we chose "POLYPHONY"

• Write an automated email with all the quiz instructions that would send half way through the party so I didn't have to worry about distributing papers.

• Manually sent everyone who was a hunt target instructions on how to be found and how they could still play.

A couple of things that didn't really work were:

• The building had less than ideal internet so some people were unable to access the form until after the event...

• Fortunately people seemed to be enjoying the networking event so no one was checking their phone and didn't see the instructions for the hunt until much later than I'd originally intended.

• Clearly not enough people understood what was going on because we only had 25 people complete the form out of 100 guests.

But overall this experience was a marvellous success. ChatGPT helped me cut something that would probably have taken 4 or 5 hours down to just 30 mins, and taught me a load about Google Polls and the possibilities of AI in the process. It was very cool.

Link to the full conversation with ChatGPT in the comments!