Create shared Google calendar, sharing everyone's events without showing details

Question

I want to create a shared calendar with a group of friends, showing everyone's availability, without everyone having to go out of their way to create a detail-less copy of all their personal events to share.

This question is close to what I want, in that any one of us can share availability-only with another account, but if I understand correctly, only that account owner (ie, the "given individual" in the upvoted answer to that question) would be able to see all the shared events together. What I would like to be able to do is:

• Create an account and give it a calendar
• Have everyone simply share their events at free/busy detail level with that account as per the answer to the linked question, meaning they don't have to create duplicates of everything they add
• Said account can now see everyone's availability
• Have that account share its calendar with my friends and myself
• Everyone can now see everyone else's availability

Would that 4th/5th step work? Or is everyone just going to have to create a detail-less duplicate of each event to add to a shared calendar?

I'll be testing this myself, but thought it could be a useful question to ask in the meantime.

Answer 1

I've had the same problem and as far as I understand what you are after I think your approach (whilst perfectly sensible) won't achieve what (I grasp of) your goal.

If you all individually share a calendar with a "central" account, said account will be able to see your individual unavailabilities but not forward them in turn.

Best option (for that specific problem, ignoring all pootential problems that this would bring along) would be to have a common account, shared by everyone that they sync there devices to and that they share their calendar with ...

That is less than ideal but that is the best I have to offer.

Maybe you can look for a way for every one to share with a list of a group but I'm not sure about that.

(and just a word of warning, I've had an experience of this where multiple people shared unavailabilities like this but all-day events never showed up. It took us way too long to realise that those are set to availability:free by default ...)