If your office suffers of  “conference room abuse” you should build your own “roominator” to coordinate it:

Conference Room Abuse is where people 2 or more people randomly grab a conference without any regard to the schedule for the room. Its a problem many companies face.

[Rapleaf] tried to solve this by creating a system to coordinate the (mis)use of room conferences

The hardware consists of two parts: a display unit that’s posted outside of each conference room, and a controller unit that’s located in Rapleaf’s wiring closet. The display unit shows the current and upcoming reservations and an LED status indicator that can tell you from a distance whether a room is “good to grab”. It also has a pair of buttons – one to make an ad-hoc reservation and one to cancel the current reservation. The controller unit interfaces with all the displays to distribute power and data, both of which run over a single standard Cat5e cable. Both the controller and the displays are Arduino-based.

The software component is a Rails web site that allows for configuration and integrates with Google Calendar. Reservations made via Google Calendar are sync’d with the Roominator, and vice-versa. The controller unit polls the web site for the information it should pass to the displays.

Rapleaf  open sourced the code on github, with all the instructions for the set up.

via [Kinlane] source [Rapleaf]