why did we get rid of multiple participation dates?

[khuffman]

@cjallen-epscor A question: when I joined er-core in Aug 2013, on the user profile we used to allow for multiple participation date ranges. But in Jan 9, 2014 you made this commit: https://github.com/EPSCoR/ERCore-3.1/commit/2f8d3c90071a35e8f8d6e8d1a9dd6c78a676bcab in which (see line 3090), you changed
'cardinality' => '-1' to 'cardinality' => '1' for field 'field_er_participating_date' , so now we only have one single participation date range. Do you remember why you made this change? I have gone back to my emails from Jan 2014 and I can't find anything that mentioned that we should switch to just one participation date range but I might have missed something, I appreciate if you can remember why we did this switch. We in RI like to have the option to enter multiple participation date ranges, but I don't want to just do it without finding out why you disabled it on Jan 9, 2014, do you know if this was causing some problems?

[iserna]

@khuffman and @cjallenunm I remember when this was removed but there is no record of why it was removed. I found a card on our old Trello board, in the To Do column but no followup on why, https://trello.com/c/nNd63RP4. Kia you still have access to this Trello board if you want to take a look.

Kia how will you be using this extra date and how should it be reflected or populated in the templates?

Isis

[khuffman]

@iserna thank you for finding that card on Trello, it gave me the idea that maybe I should be looking in my email archive from Sept.2013 instead. I found some email exchanges between me, Andrew W and Brent, discussing the multiple participation dates. I will forward them to you. In short: on Sept 5, 2013 Andrew W. wrote to Brent:

There's two dates like that because the participating date can accept multiple date ranges. This is by design.

but what is strange is that then he filed in that Trello card the on Sept 10. So maybe he found something that was conflicting with having multiple date fields? I don't know. Our PA would like to have multiple participation dates as a mean to support the chronology/resume type of data in the description of work field. Basically as a way to keep a history of people who "come and go" as EPSCoR participants.

[iserna]

@khuffman and I were talking about this earlier and recall having both fields when we initially launched our site but we removed it. Participants were adding dates to the second date field/option which was messing up our data, so we decided to take it out. I don't think it was clear how it was suppose to work from the reporting perspective and if it was complete. Maybe that's why it was taken out? Anyhow, we have not been in a situation where people come and go, that I know of. I will see what our PA says and ask what other jurisdictions are doing or if they anticipate this as a possible scenario.

BTW, thank you for digging in your archive for this info!

[iserna]

I spoke with Mary Jo about multiple participating dates and she was not for or against the addition. Though, she did say that she has not had to look back at a previous reporting year in the system or didn't feel like she needed the system. She simply relies on the templates from prior years or from our External Evaluator who takes all of our data and creates a new report for NSF. She also thought that a change in roles like a student becoming a faculty, or a faculty becoming a student was very slim. And if there was we would know exactly who they were. With that said, I think this may be another jurisdictional preference. New Hampshire had the same question and they do want to track people and have an accurate historical record of the data.

[iserna]

As of 09/09/2015 @khuffman is testing on RI test site. After they finish updating Collaborations and Proposal & Grants she will test and report back.