Sharing this here for the sake of openness as recommended by @nukeador
Disucssions so far
Please refer to this bug for discussions happened so far
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1441023
Discussions so far in the bug:
@ranjithraj
Found out reps portal allows only vouched mozillians to RSVP, and did not allow them to RSVP to the event as their profiles are not yet vouched.
Mozillians irrespective of their vouch status should be allowed to RSVP to events in reps portal.
Receiving a vouch is hard, sometimes it takes time for various reasons, sometimes in spite of their contribution history. Not allowing them to participate/RSVP to events just because of the reason they are not vouched is a practice of exclusion and it not good for our community health. Allowing them to RSVP is very helpful.
Usually a vouch is a way to identify volunteers from the various people on mozillians.
There are a lot of people on mozillians that are not mozillians and let to all of them to RSVP maybe can be a problem.
Also we have to not forget that actually there is no way to moderate the RSVP in events (there is a ticket about it).
@Shashikanth171
Can we allow every mozillian to RSVP and then on the backend have a count on RSVPs made by vouched mozillains?
Presently when community has to organise events they have to depend on other platfroms for all purposes of Event management. Why is it that volunteers have to bear an overhead of making sure they RSVP on reps platform too?
In my opinion, reps portal is currently just for record keeping. I don’t see it helping in organising events in any way.
Currently there is large barrier in the community growth with respect to event management. If volunteers precious time is spent on doing the repetitive/periodical tasks in an disorganised way, it is definitely a loss for the community.
If we could have people RSVP on our platfrom and also have volunteers to do event management like send follow up emails, calender invites, subscription lists etc. Having a standard infrastructure in place can boost community growth a lot.
To give you an example, how many community events ask for feedback in reality and use the criticisms to get better. Imagine, if we can send an auto follow up email for feedback and publish the feedback and also a post feedback report made by volunteers to list learnings on the event page. This will bring more openness to the community increasing quality events and supporting growth of volunteers.
@mkohler
I agree that unvouched mozillians should be able to RSVP to events as well. I don’t think there is a major downside to this.
@Mte90
Non mozillians is not a problem but personally I will prefer that before we have the feature to remove (and add maybe manually) the people that made a RSVP. We have few cases of private council meetings where mozillians on the portal RSVP for that meeting but this is not really true.
As said by 171 is only for recording but this is not blocking us for the future to transform in something else.
About feedback for activate we have a feedback form to use from all the reps but for that the big issue is the localization of the content.
@Shashikanth171
For giving an example for Subscription lists. Volunteers do the same work for promoting event every time, which means that they are only reaching out to same set of people even though they are putting efforts.
If people once attended(RSVP’ed) could opt to get updates on future events or community. This will let the volunteers to put efforts in order to increase the reach of their campaign. How sad is it that even though you can reach out to many more you aren’t able to because you can only put so much time in volunteering. We need to encourage volunteers to venture out, think about what they can do for community rather than having them do same set of tasks.
It’s not that reps portal is limiting volunteers. It’s that reps portal can be a more than what it is now and support volunteers in doing things they like to.
@nukeador
As I commented over Telegram, this requests needs to be first evaluated and a decision needs to be made if we want this feature or not.
Once that happens it should be prioritized by the dev team having in mind other pending issues.
For the sake of openness I suggest the conversation about this feature request take place in the Reps discourse, this way everyone would be able to participate and Council can take an informed decision go or not-go. I would recommend to clearly explain the problem statement there first before jumping into solution-mode directly:
https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/reps/Thanks!
IMHO anything that is more than simply allowing non-vouched Mozillians to RSVP is out of scope. So I think a big part of those comments include too many things.
The feature request for moderating the RSVP can be found here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364647
Now, if we agree that non-vouched Mozillians should be able to RSVP, but only if there is a moderation, we should mark it as a blocker.
Now my more elaborate feedback (after thinking about a bit more, somehow contradicting to my initial one):
- Should the Reps portal be a full-featured event platform? Using it for non-vouched Mozillians would suggest that. I don’t think it should be. We would end up building a new Meetup.com or whatever is out there, and I’m sure we can’t do it better than the big players. I don’t even want to talk about resources available now and in the future to develop and maintain it. I understand the need of having a full-featured event platform, I’m personally using meetup.com for our community in Switzerland. For that we should look into integrating with a platform, not building our own though. I know that Open Innovation Products& Engineering (cc @r_Up2mI1KfXvmSMPkEfhC6eg/@akilroy ) is looking into SplashThat for CoSS. Maybe they can share more about the current status there?
- If we allow non-vouched Mozillians to RSVP, that would mean making everyone register as a Mozillian on mozillians.org before RSVP’ing. Is that something we want? Another doubt from my side to be honest.
I think this is a completely different topic, and if that should be discussed, another topic here on Discourse might be better suited for that.
So far my feedback.
Cheers,
Michael
2 Likes
I agree with Michael. What is the purpose of the Reps platform replicate the features of a event service or to track what the Reps and community are doing?
If today we implement that later we will find requests to implement more things from this side.
If a community needs something to track attendees and don’t want use a service there are a lot of open source tools to cover this feature.
We actually have issues on fix old bugs on the portal (from tiny to big feature) and plan something like that (other then develop) seems an huge task.
Also we don’t have to forget that actually every new patch is made on the portal by the community, so it is a volunteer that do the code and analyze with others what to do. In few words is not so simple.
I think that the Reps portal need more priority on internal needs then this kind of things. If you want to see the list of opened ticket to the portal (84 actually).
That’s why I think we need to better understand what’s the problem we seek to solve here.
Can we describe a user case that is a problem right now? I suspect this is about non-mozillians or new mozillians registering to Reps events.
Why that’s important? What’s blocking?
(Please, understand my questions as a way to fully understand the scope of this problem to be able to offer the right path to resolution)
You are correct that we are using SplashThat. We’ll have pilot events out in the next few weeks that allow us to work out the kinks and then I will circulate a rollout plan including trainings, access, etc