Freehub-next-gen

Things we should change with freehub

objectives

• centralise data
• address the important stuff
• make it functional for people, so they aren't tempted to use other systems
• clearly distinguish between activities and roles and services, and add more granularity to the data
• better reporting of our membership
• better reporting of our class attendance

next steps

• [ ] review this list for sanity
• [ ] send to the IT Cluster for LoE scoping
• [ ] Prioritise the tasks
• [ ] send to the other Co-ops using freehub for feedback
• [ ] send to the listserv for feedback
• [ ] put a timeline on the features
• [ ] develop an education plan
  • Put this in the greeter guide
  • enforce the changes

remodel the data

Create a better definition of the member types (Roles) :

Define to people what the following mean. they only make sense once you understand the rest of FreeHub

• patron
• staff
• youth (under 18)

ALON: Do you see these as mutually exclusive? Don't we have both patrons and staff that are youth? On the details page for a person we ask for (optionally) year of birth. The intent was that for all people under 18 we want to capture their year of birth. I believe Jessie requested this a year ago or so. We don't capture this consistently b/c greeters do not know that they should do this.

That said, clarifying patron v. staff or coming up with a clearer designation is certainly a good idea.

Add additional daily states (Activities)

• Visiting
• Volunteering
• Staff mechanic (instead of just staff hanging out in the shop)
• Attending a class
• Greeter

Alon: this is a good one for discussion. It intersects heavily with the Role comments above.

Add additional services

• Staff in training
• Volunteer hours, can we track their individual hours ?
• Key holder, so we can track issue and expiry times.

Alon: I believe I understand the desires here. My concern is practice in the real world. Are we really prepared to track all volunteer hours in Freehub? Isn't the card system working? For key holders, wouldn't a wiki page work fine? I don't think the issue is that Freehub can't track it. It think the issue is that there is not a person or process responsible for the tracking. Once we get that sorted, there may be incremental benefits to getting it in to Freehub at which time I think we consider it. I'm definitely open to being convinced otherwise.

Create better tracking of memberships and attendance

• sign in all staff mechs on a shift
• identify when a memberships as a renewal or a new membership
• enforce some required fields. ZIP and PHONE (or email)
• add a Youth (under 18) field.
• flag to show if the liability form was signed
• check people into classes

Alon: a few comments...

Yes, all mechanics should sign in. This is just policy/practice, right?

Freehub knows when a membership is a renewal if there is already an earlier membership. We don't need to capture any more information. Do you want to show this in the UI somehow?

The only field we require is name. This has been largely an age old privacy concern at the BK for general attendance. However, we do ask for more information for members. Maybe what we want to do is require more personal information for members.

There is a Year of Birth field already. A Youth flag doesn't quite make sense as someone will have to manually remove the flag when they turn 18 and that's never going to happen.

If we add class services for each person when they sign up for a class then sign them in to the shop when they show up for the class is that not sufficient? This is what I do when I teach a class but am pretty sure that other teachers do not. Isn't this another policy/practice issue or is there something else you are hoping to achieve?

Create better tracking on the "in the shop today" list

• Highlight people who are Staff mechs for that shift
• highlight people who have digging rights

Alon: good ideas. I've also thought that list could better represent what is actually going on.

Better Tracking on notes

• auto enter the date on a note
• make a note sticky so it always shows in the daily sign in list

Alon: notes do automatically get the current date/time. What is missing?

Also, I think I need more clarification on the "sticky" desire. Is that showing the most recent note or something else?

better reporting

• summary report

Create a new report that lists memberships per week/month and if they were volunteer or paid for and if they were a renewal.

explain the columns on the 'summary report'.. 'Patron' overlaps with other values.

break them out as : TOTAL, Staff, MEMBERS, non-members, youth , ( and volunteer as an additional # AFTER the TOTAL)

• Visits report

group each user, report the number of visits in the time period

• People report

list if they have a membership and the start date of that membership

• services report

group all services under one person for a date range

Add new reports

• Current volunteers
• current staff in training
• Current digging rights owners
• Current keyholders
• expired members (so we can actively renew them)

Alon: I love the interest in more reporting. One question to consider for each of these is who is going to run the report, for what purpose and to share with who. That will help me understand the need behind the report.