How to represent this notion of "favored" participant?

Question

I'm introducing the concept :

Suppose a webapp aiming to suggest some meetings to targeted people so that they can participate to at least one of them. So there's a page listing the items and a page showing the details of each item, when clicking.

Let's illustrate the meetings list page:

So here we see two published meetings waiting for participants.

So let's click on the first item: Engineers Meeting, displaying the detail page:

We can detect that Michael (the creator) and Kevin are participating (obvious for Michael since he's the creator).

So to sum up the use case: Michael wants 9 participants for his meeting. Kevin has seen the publication and clicked on "Participate". (I don't show the Participate button in the mockup since it doesn't matter).

All this workflow seems (I think) to be intuitive for any users.

So now my new use case, a little touchy:

James publishes a Meeting announcement waiting for 10 participants (him + 9 others).
However, he expects some people to be present like, let's say, Julia.
So while creating the meeting announcement, James marks Julia as being a "Favored participant". Meaning that Julia is likely to NOT participate BUT her place is LOCKED anyway unless she desists.
This would prevent 9 other people participating, getting the meeting complete/full, BEFORE she could participate too.

So my question is: how should I represent the people effectively participating and favored people (a place locked for each one) that should participate, but are not forced to?

My expectations are:

• Any user (potential participant) MUST see the favored people, so that they can know which people are likely to participate.
• A favored people that has not participated yet MUST not be counted as a participant.
• A meeting MUST not be full before favored people respond. They are priority.

I imagine this way:

Any better idea?

Answer 1

I would suggest you to use iconography for this. You can treat part above the line as list view and once user tap on it show the detailed view. (As shown below)

IMO you can use the entire block in list view.

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• The favored participant has been shown with a heart. (Obviously the ticked one are those who have accepted the meeting)

• The help icon will help other participants including favored one to know more about the favored feature.

• "Waiting for XYZ more to join" is self explanatory.

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• Once All 9 participant accept the meeting except "Favored" one. Simply use the favored person name there to grab the attention i.e "Waiting for Julia to join" (I am not sure you have more than one favored participant)

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• Lets say favored participant rejects then invitation. You can make the text catchy for the last person to join. i.e "Waiting for last engineer to join"

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• In cae favored participant accepts the invitation. We can show the participant as regular participants who have accepted the request.

Answer 2

Maybe you are trying to reinvent the wheel. Restaurants, theatres, and other venues have the concept of:

• Reserved seat
• Free seat

And they also have a limited number of seats for each session (dinner, play,...). When you want to buy a seat, they display you the number of available seats as:

Total seats - Reserved seats

This way, if Julia reserved a seat, no one will take her place.

One thing that you are missing in your application, is the opportunity for someone to give up their seat. If Julia has a reserved seat, but she knows that she will not attend, it makes sense that she can tell that to the organizer, so that they stop reserving her seat, and someone else might take her place.