EliAndrewC
commented
9 years ago I'm ambivalent about this feature request, for a couple of reasons.
1) We really need people to complete the volunteer checklist anyway to give us food restrictions, tshirt sizes, and (excepting this year) fire safety training info, etc.
2) Ok, but we could just send them reminder emails about that other stuff but not send reminder emails about the hotel room stuff, right? Sure... but the hotel requests are still used in the Hotel Assignment admin page to help admins assign people to rooms. This comes up especially when we have different number of people arriving on different days and so not all hotel rooms for a group such as the Dorsai have the same check-in day, so it's helpful to know how many rooms we need to start on each day.
3) Ok, but we could just let them manage that internally by creating empty rooms in Uber and not explicitly assigning anyone to them, right? Sure... but at this point I feel like we're jumping through a lot of hoops so that people don't need to make 2-5 extra clicks on the volunteer checklist, on which they already need to be filling out the other steps anyway.
4) Lastly, although this particular thing I'm about to describe hasn't been a problem with the Dorsai, we've had plenty of cases of the following thing happening:
- department head talks to their underlings a few months before MAGFest and underlings say, "yeah, we're totally coming"
- volunteer checklist goes live, some underlings don't fill any part of it out
- Department head assumes underlings are all coming without re-checking with them and creates rooms for them even though they haven't officially confirmed they're coming
- we eventually learn (either when hotel roommate emails go out OR at the event) that underlings decided not to come
I totally get the use case that's driving this feature request - I really do. However, I can't help but read this feature request as, "Uber shouldn't force its Staffers to perform the 2-5 extra clicks it currently requires in order for them to be given hotel room space."
If there's some use case that I don't get which is driving this, something of the form "I'd like to use Uber for managing this hotel block, except that Uber doesn't _____" then I'd really like to know so that I can add any missing features.
With all that being said, one change we could easily make (which might clear up a lot of confusion in cases like this):
- Departments could be configured as "Block assignment" departments such as Dorsai and Marketplace, etc
- Staffers in those departments would get the same emails, but with some different wording about how we still need them to confirm that they're coming to MAGFest so we can allocate the correct number of hotel rooms
- for people in those departments, instead of displaying form fields with roommate requests, we'd instead display a message about how as a member of
they'll be assigned to a room by their department heads as part of the room block
thaeli
ksonney
Some staffing groups (particularly the DI) get a block of rooms and manage their own assignments. Please add a setting (if one does not already exist) to allow or prevent sending the room request reminders.