role creation

[philbrondyke]

Per the discussion last week, can we create a few different roles with varying permissions? This is a first stab at trying to break these down and is not an exhaustive list.

Here are a few suggestions for views.

• Admin
  • Full access
  • Ability to see everything as it exists now
  • Can create new tasks and task groups
  • Ability to see how many clerks/transcribers are working in real time
  • Can modify settings to tasks and groups
• Data Manager
  • Can only see assigned task (i.e. one specific election)
  • Can modify settings to tasks and groups
  • Once logged in, the dashboard view should be only the current task
  • Ability to see how many clerks/transcribers are working in real time
  • Can edit/prioritize task groups
  • Can edit data
  • Can assign users/number of users to task groups
• Data Clerk/Transcriber
  • Can only see assigned task (i.e. one specific election)
  • Once logged in, the dashboard view should be the "view transcriptions" and "start transcribing"
  • Is there a way to provide a personalized dashboard for the clerks so that they could have a "my transcriptions" tab or home screen? This would have the documents that they have transcribed and potentially a comparison graph to other users? ("You're in the top XX% of digitizers!")
  • Can transcribe data
• Visitor
  • Would be used mainly for organized efforts so that view-only permissions on the status of the digitization to show off the progress
  • Likely wouldn't be a heavily utilized role but good to build in

[philbrondyke]

Also, would we be able to show the user's role subtly on the top ribbon?

[philbrondyke]

It's listed above, but would we be able to construct data clerk and manager dashboards, as they would be only looking at one task group?

(The user toggle with role and transcriptions is fantastic, BTW!)

[cathydeng]

hey Phil! I've got a few questions re: roles

so, having roles that are associated with certain task groups is considerably more difficult than having roles that are associated with permissions (e.g. being able to create tasks, edit tasks, etc) because the task groups are created dynamically.

for data manager roles, how will these be created? e.g. will each data manager be able to access only one task group, or will a given data manager be able to access multiple task groups? the latter would be a bit more complicated. does it matter if roles are assigned when creating users, or when creating tasks? right now we don't have a way to create new users in the interface yet, so this would be relevant in fleshing that out.

for assigning tasks to transcribers, I'm not sure baking assignments into user roles is the best approach. for the transcribers, can you explain the rationale between only having a single task visible to a particular transcriber? right now the transcriber only sees one task per task group, but can see multiple task groups. limiting transcribers to one task also seems to go against having an anonymous user being able to help out without logging in.

[derekeder]

@philbrondyke we have 2 kinds of roles right now

• admins - have access to everything, including creating tasks and viewing results
• clerks/anonymous - can only transcribe documents, and can only see the top task for each task group

I think the best approach would be to keep things with this simple configuration, and revisit additional roles if/when the need comes up. Thoughts?

[philbrondyke]

That's fine for now, I think, but in the long run we would want someone who's sole job it would be to just manage data transcriptions without any permissions to modify tasks. It's less of an issue of trust and more an issue of limiting the number of people with the ability to screw up the flow of the project. It's something we try to mitigate in the election monitoring databases that we help observer groups use and the impetus for this intermediary role.

As for the visitor role, this would be a role that we'd want for an official observer, such as a journalist, State Department/government official and members of the international community in the countries in which these projects would be deployed. Essentially, it would be a way to make them feel as though they're 'seeing behind the curtain' with a login.

[cathydeng]

what do you mean by manage data transcriptions? do you mean prioritizing tasks & viewing transcriptions? if so, that'd be fairly straightforward to set up.

it'd be complicated to set up permissions that vary by task, e.g. user X only has access to task group Y. but it'd be straightforward to set up permissions like allowing user X to view all transcription tasks & preventing user X from editing any tasks.

[philbrondyke]

@msbrown and I discussed the roles and what you mentioned sounded good. We're envisioning data managers, as members of civil society organizations or general coordinators who have politicial and management skills but not advanced tech skills.

Ideally we'd want them to be able to:

• Adjust the priorities of tasks
• Add/edit/delete users
• See all the tasks (no need to vary by task or edit tasks)
• Edit transcriptions
• [BONUS] Ability to assign user types to certain tasks. (For example, assign anonymous users to less politically important data)

[cathydeng]

cool, thanks for the clarification! the first three points make sense, & would definitely be do-able for a user type

re: the 4th point - there currently isn't any functionality for editing transcriptions, and it's probably best to keep it that way, so that we don't destroy data. reconciliation is happening automatically, when enough people submit the same transcription.

re: the bonus - that sounds more like a task configuration, e.g. whether a task is visible to an anonymous user as a task setting (similar to deadline & reviewer count). this would require changing code in a lot of places, so let's table it for now?