Modify broadcast page to make it easier to follow

The suggestion
Have the subject and the message body at the top of the page.
Leave the old message there as default when you start, but accept the new message immediately (nothing that happens on the page brings the old message back).
Have the selectors and the resultant list below the message
Clicking "Apply" will not delete the contents of the message box nor return the old message to it
Have the whole list appear below the selectors.
Now the tick box at the top will select everyone that appears in the list.
This might be slow to load, but takes away the confusion about who is selected, and saves the time asking the primary coordinator if they did it right.

Why make a change: The story
Our coordinators have trouble using broadcast messages, and it is about the layout and order you do things.

There are 2 things that catch them
1) the message box can jump back to the old message unexpectedly
2) no confidence that everyone has been selected.

If you change the selectors for the people then the message box returns to its original message not the one you have just typed in.

Sometimes people forget to click apply at the top, then put in the message, then get to the bottom of the page find the wrong list of people, go back to the top and choose again and then have wiped out their message.

You can't see the results of your selection while you make it as the list at the bottom of the page.

People think they have made their choices, when they fill out the section at the top, but they haven't: they have to go to the bottom of the page and tick boxes and probably the Select all link as well. So that is about 3 things to do in 2 different parts of the page in order to send a message to all members (which is what we mostly do).

However, although the "Select all 300 rows in this view" is moderately helpful, noone knows what a "view" is. And people are unsure who they have selected when they use this. They email me and say maybe they only sent it to 20 people instead of everyone.

Attached is my instruction sheet for doing a broadcast message which demonstrates the trickiness of the process of people.

I found that when a user tries to respond to an offer or request a form is there, ready to be used to message the poster about your inquiry. The problem is that the subject field of the message is blank. It should be automatically populated with something like:

Re. your offer/want entitled "[advertisement title you already picked out when creating the offer/want]"

The name of the advertisement should also be a hyperlink to the ad so the message recipient can easily check the ad to refresh her memory. This way the recipient of the message will never have to guess at what the hell the sender of the message is talking about.

From: Jim Tate - Our Time Bank <jimft...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:29:37 -0800 (PST)
Local: Wed, Dec 14 2011 8:29 pm
Subject: Proposal to Expand Site Admin Roles

It looks like CW2.1 may start development in January/February 2012.
This probably means we will not have it to test until sometime in the
spring at the earliest. The subsequent steps of testing, fixing,
documenting, and training could take another couple months. My guess is that the rollout of CW2.1 would not be until summer, some 6-7 months from now.

Many TB’s are suffering now from the many short comings in CW2.0.
Such shortcomings are well known and have already received majority
votes on the CW2 User Voice Forum; their solutions will surely be
part of CW2.1. But why wait another ½ year? A Site Admin can make most of these fixes now! This is not rocket science. We do not need to be Drupal developers. We need to be conscientious and responsible people who can follow instructions, procedures. Our existing SA’s, who have solved most of these CW2 shortcomings for their TB’s have, or can, create procedures, guidelines for a Asst Site Admin to follow.

Yes, I am proposing a new role: Assistant Site Administrator. This
role would not have all the Drupal privileges of a full SA, just
enough privileges to solve some of the most pressing CW2 issues their TB’s are faced with. I believe there is enough knowledge in our
newly forming CW2 Admin Forum, on the TimeBanks Action Hub, to make recommendations for a set of privileges to be assigned to this new role.

With this reduced set of privileges there still remains risk ... risk
that a person in the new role could deviate from the procedures and
cause an accident that would need to be repaired quickly by Geek
Gene, or another 3rd party. Costs of such repairs would need to be born by the TB who caused the problem. These costs could be quite high if they affect other TB’s as well (CW2 resides in a multi-entity
database with several shared features/functions).

Following the procedures and instructions would be at the heart of
making this new role safe from causing possible harm to our Community Weaver Content Management System. I believe TB coordinators only want to do good for their TB’s and would be willing to sign a reasonable agreement to that affect. We can craft a new agreement that is not as intimidating as the existing SA agreement
http://actionhub.timebanks.org/content/site-admin-application-privile...
but still lets one know they must step-up to a higher level of
responsibility and be held accountable.

When CW2.1 is finally released, some of the changes made at some
sites would be overwritten and need to be made again. Other changes
(related to the shortcomings) would, hopefully, be replaced by fixes
built into CW2.1. I think a little extra work when CW2.1 is rolled
out outweighs the negative affect of living with the shortcomings for
another 6-7 months.

Please let us know your thoughts on this proposal by voting and posting your comments.

Thank you,

Jim Tate

We know the user guides are being updated as technical problem tickets are updated and as time permits. When we go to the guides to see what may have been updated, we have no idea where to begin and it is too time consuming to just review each page for changes since our last visit.

I suggest a list of revision dates be kept by (page number would be ideal, but there is no page number) guide and topic. This would allow us to go right to the changes since our last visit.

I just noticed the guides have been reorganized and topics have been grouped under header topics. I think this makes it more time consuming to search for a topic, especially without a table of contents that tells us where to find the topics we are interested in.

As I continue to work on initiating the Timebank for Occupy Wall Street, the implications of exchanging work time for live/work space dawn on me. In some ideal way the Timebank assumes equality of time and space. People offer themselves in space and time and they are offered space and time – to sleep, to eat, to work, to play.

The world’s people are so precious. I was at the 30-year-old Bullet artist squat first floor Gallery on the East side last night. I watched a video about the Latino Umbrella squat on the lower east side and was struck with the culture they created – how in this dwelling that they took over and made a home to so many, they had created culture. They had devoted themselves to their own space in time, with time.

A man spoke up about how, in our economy, our time is slowly taken away from us - if we want space our time is devoured by work – we waste our lives. If space and time are equal for everyone – as seems most natural, it is a perversion of nature to assume some people deserve so much more space and that their time is so much more valuable.

In some ideal way the Timebank assumes equality of time and space. In a more humanized way, people offer themselves in space and time and they are offered space and time – to sleep, to eat, to work, to play.

In the Control Panel under "Users Awaiting Approval of their Membership" it would be helpful if there were an option to delete them. I have a number of users who signed up in CW1.0 whose accounts were transferred to CW2.0 but who have not completed the additional requirements for joining the timebank. Since for most of them it has been over a year since they created their online profile, I assume they will not be joining. I have tried to Block them, but they are still visible in the box. Does anyone have any idea how I can get rid of them?

When one members sends another member a private message through the site, the recipient gets an email notification. In order to reply to that message, they click the link in the email, but often those links do not work. When I tested it, I saw some that worked and some that didn't. But in the past week I've been getting more and more reports from members saying they links DO NOT work. This is very frustrating for members and should be pretty easy to fix.

Are others finding this problem too?
Can Geek Gene please tell us when you fix this so we can test it and notify our members?