Warn the user if an application is not known to be inside the notice period

[oajirabot]

We've had reports from both councils and responders that it's a bad experience for everyone when a responder sends a response to an application, but that response is ignored because the application is outside of its notice period. The feedback we've had suggests that the experience would be better for everyone if the responder knew ahead of time whether their feedback was likely to fall outside of the notification period.

We would still want to allow people to comment and to send that feedback to council; at most, we'd be wanting to let people know that the feedback they're providing is only going to be informal feedback rather than an officially considered response.

This would include:

• Complying developments, which never have a notice period, but which people may which to comment on and discuss anyway
  • Applications which haven't yet started their notice period, or for which no notice period is yet known
  • Applications which are past the end of their notice period.

[mlandauer]

We already warn people with wording on the comment form if we know that it's outside the time but we don't stop them from submitting. So, this is already done.

[jamezpolley]

We only know the notification period for a tiny fraction of applications; the vast majority don't have the notice period on the site at the time we first scrape the application. So in the vast majority of cases, we give no warnings to users ever.

That may change once the scrapers are picking up updates - if the scrapers are looking for the notice period in the right place, if the information is available at all.

But this still leaves complying developments, which have no notice period; as well as all the applications for which we can't scrape notice periods.

I don't think we can say that this is "done" when we currently don't have anything to show for almost all DAs.

I do think that we want to be very careful with anything we do warn the user about; we don't want to scare them off commenting, because their comment is still valuable. The most we'd want to do is set an expectation that we believe that the Authority won't consider their comment as a formal comment.

I'm open to the idea that maybe we shouldn't even do that though. Thinking about what I wrote in https://github.com/openaustralia/planningalerts/pull/1380/files - PA also aims to foster continuous civil discussion; and if the Authorities choose to ignore what their residents are saying just because it falls outside of a particular time window, they should be willing to explain that to their Residents.

So perhaps our decision is that although we acknowledge that commenting on a DA and then finding out that it's outside of its formal notice window is not a good experience, we believe that it's up to the Authority to think about ways to better offer their residents opportunities to be involved in discussions, rather than something we can fix on PA?

[mlandauer]

The current way that it works was a very active design choice. If we can't get the notification period in scraping we do not know whether we're in a "formal" notification period or not. Any of the other information, like when it was scraped, or when the application was received is no help in determining that.

We should be designing for things as they should be not how they are right now. In this case if the council decides for whatever reason not consider a comment "formally" they can let the citizen know. Even if the council decides not to consider it, they really ought to (assuming a decision hasn't already been made) and at the very least the comment goes on planningalerts and other nearby citizens get notified of the comment.

[mlandauer]

When we get to the point of tracking decisions made on an application (whether it's been approved or not) we can add an extra level of humanness to the interaction. We can say "Hey, the council has already approved this application so sending a comment to the council will not change anything. However, you can still send one if you want and it will still get displayed on planningalerts" - (obviously the real wording will be much more concise and eloquent)

[mlandauer]

I'm being very wordy here and this is my final comment for the moment - we should say things when we know something definite (e.g. this application has been approved). We shouldn't say something when we don't know something or give a vague guidance that does little other than cover our ass or confuse. I think saying something like "the council may or may not formally consider what you say depending on the specific rules which we don't know" is just noise, confusing, and off-putting and bureaucratic which is the exact opposite of what we should be.

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