Event Volunteers

[hennevogel]

Organizers should be able to indicate volunteer positions for the event and visitors should be able to indicate that they are willing to fill those positions.

[hennevogel]

Done in 64b2b8b

[hennevogel]

I just had a discussion with @ChrisBr and we think that the current implementation is very hard to understand. This should be refactored. Either we make this a way simpler question via the question builder (do you want to volunteer?) or we refactor the relations and interface.

[differentreality]

Making this a simple question is over-simplified. In fact, instead of having just a checkbox, we might as well continue using the gdoc forms (as far as openSUSE conf is concerned), they would be more useful.

Volunteers tracking is something that a lot of conferences lack, and it's not really by choice. Having a good and useful feature in OSEM would be, in my opinion, a big plus.

Signing up as a volunteer is one thing. But from the organizer's point of view, more information would be required so as to evaluate your volunteers and properly assign them to positions. For that reason, a comments-box is welcome, so that we understand whom we are dealing with.

On the other hand, not everyone who volunteers is up for every single volunteering post, and that's understandable. That's why we need to list the available positions, so that people can choose. That way we have people volunteering in positions they actually want to volunteer in. That means more chances that volunteers would do a better job (and that's what organizers need) and volunteers will be happier with their volunteering too.

Taking things to the next level (or the absolutely necessary level for a bit bigger conferences) organizers need to come up with a very specific timetable of who is where from which time to which time, who is in charge of a certain volunteering post and which other volunteers are available in case needed. Which is why we need to know which days/times each volunteering post is needed, as well as, which day/time each volunteer will be available. [Note: Not all volunteering posts are needed through a conference, or there are volunteering posts only on the day before the conference, such as setup. In addition volunteers probably want to attend the conference too, so they probably won't volunteer throughout the whole conference.]

Having that information, we can create a volunteers schedule, which is absolutely necessary for any organizer, as far as I am concerned - and having this feature in OSEM is undoubtedly better than hand-written volunteers-schedules.

[hennevogel]

I absolutely agree that this would be a useful feature. It's just not really understandable in the current form, neither for organizers nor for volunteers. And having code for something that isn't understandable and hence not useable doesn't make much sense.

[jmls]

has there been any progress on this feature ?

[differentreality]

Nop, not yet unfortunatelly

[differentreality]

@ChrisBr @hennevogel Douglas asked if we would have volunteer management of somekind available for oSC16 (https://trello.com/c/OvlKctwx/28-volunteer-team). I said that it is too big of a feature to commit to that, but I wanted to confirm with you too. I would be more than willing to work on it, if we decide on implementation.

[hennevogel]

Let's get all the other loose ends under control first, shall we?