kevincrepin
commented
2 weeks ago This is indeed a difficult one because there are pros and cons for both directions, but as we have understood before, keeping phases simultaneously open adds a lot of complexity to the current logic, in my opinion. How we show phases and how we talk about it, and especially in its current linear form, everything implies that phases follow up on another, not happen concurrently.
When we approached the dynamic phases we also ended up deciding that once a new phase gets added, it closes the previous phase. Mainly to keep things focused, because it would be very easy to have different conversations happening in different phases and information would easily get lost. If we would allow phases to remain open then there can be ideas being discussed in the idea gathering phase (which we can't call phase anymore then imo) and in the meantime another pro/con discussion can be happening – potentially about that same idea. It would a lot of pressure on the admin to keep eyes on everything all the time, just so they would be able to pick up on these situations and then maybe close a phase.
There is also a "philosophical" aspect to this as in order to move a decision-making process forward, would it not make sense to (at one point) decide that "we have discussed enough, now it's time to vote" or "we have enough ideas, now let's discuss them in pro/con format". Instead of "everything is open, go nuts, total anarchy" :D
So for me personally it would make sense that there cannot be 2 phases open at the same time. And maybe it makes more sense to include a sort of discussion aspect to the voting phase if this is lacking, rather than having that discussion take place in a different (simultaneous) phase.
BeccaMelhuish
Making a spin-off issue from this issue to discuss with @kevincrepin, Lydia and @TiinaDUX what the best UX would actually be, rather than just the quick fix needed more imminently :)
What is the problem? Currently the flow of which new phases close existing phases works like this (in theory, though not currently in practice, as per #1216), if the process starts from idea gathering:
Why is this a problem? There's a bit of inconsistency there, sometimes starting a new phase closes a previous one, but sometimes not. This makes a somewhat confusing and hard to remember inconsistency (even in our own team we're having to test it out to check what closing a phase does to previous phases), which doesn't seem like great UX.
Possible solution.
Personally, I'm torn:
One option, which I think makes the most sense to me: Why don't we not make starting a new phase close any previous phase, but remind admins (when starting a new phase) that if they want to close the previous phase they can do so manually? This would give greater flexibility to the admins to have several phases open at once, and mean there's no inconsistencies.
However I know that @kevincrepin and team have been thinking this sort of thing through a lot with the 'flexible phases' project, so probably have a clearer idea of how it should be :)
I think we may have the situation where one thing makes sense for the platform as it is now, and another makes sense for the future platform if we go with flexible phases (which I imagine will be a long time until implemented). But hopefully we can figure that out!