Sue Rosen generally does this for the periodic NEFFA caller nights at the Scout House Thursday dance. The expectation there is you have your wall clock time slots (e.g.: 7:30-7:55) and you *end* your slot on time, no matter what happened before or during your slot. Having slots specified as real clock time instead of elapsed time makes staying on/recovering to schedule much easier. I appreciate/leverage her approach and have taken it a bit more on-line.
I've done this several times for our other Scout House series. My approach is to set up a shared Google spreadsheet with the available time slots, names assigned to slots. Generally in the first "half" (curiously, longer than the second :), a given caller gets two dance slots in a row and one in the second (one caller gets the flip assignment). I have the four callers enter two dances for each slot. One choice for "beginner heavy" and the other for "more experienced". Having them all in one place, we can visualize the program choices and challenge arc of the selections. The crowd that arrives leads us to which column will be the program that night. People can comment in the sheet and we work out most conflicts or necessary adjustments on-line (or by phone, etc.) before the evening. Of course there may be some tweaks that night, but having the two program difficulty choices spelled out minimizes that.
This process typically takes about 2 weeks. Can be done in less time but would need to be led strongly with deadlines. People (particularly at this level) have focus on their "primary" job/life and the turnaround time on requests and changes can take days.
Other thoughts:
- Work out who'll introduce/recognize the band, sound, etc. (easily overdone or forgot otherwise).
- Outgoing caller introduce the next one.
- Tape a copy of the program up near the caller's mic.
- Following caller helps enforce (gently) finishing clock time of previous caller.
- Have slop slots built into your schedule (~7 minutes first half, ~5 second - not distributed into the caller slots and ideally remaining unused) and explicitly schedule any waltz/scandi and break(s) too.
- You're the glue in this process. Be ready to help out but also stay back to let them work out any issues themselves - that's part of their learning too!
Good luck!
-Don