Re: [chairs] Info for chair setup of Kavi TC areas

[Karl Best <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

Philpott, Robert wrote:
> 1.    I'm a bit concerned about Kavi performance.  I'm hitting the thing 
> here at midnight EST and it ain't exactly speedy for doing these 
> management operations.  It can't be due to system load.  I'm almost 
> positive it's not a network bandwidth issue as I'm not having any 
> general browsing issues to other sites. 

We've also been noticing some performance problems and are looking into 
what system configurations may be effecting this.

> 2.    The pointers to our charter, etc. do not show up as hyperlinks.  I 
> checked a couple other TC's and found the same problem.

Right now they're just text, so we need to convert them to HREFs.

> 3.    No role has the ability to modify group notes and charter info (or 
> any other aspect of the TC home page).  I don't remember whether this 
> was covered in the training, but this seems pretty restrictive.  Will 
> this restriction remain? 

I'm trying to figure out the best way to set this up. I want the TC 
chair to have the ability to edit the short description of the TC (the 
blurb) and notes that can be used as short announcements, but I need to 
keep control over the TC charter. I found after doing my review of the 
charters in the last week or two that TCs aren't submitting their 
changes to me for approval. So I need to keep for myself the permissions 
for editing the charter document. Let me think this one through a bit more.

 > When we got a preview in Baltimore, I thought
> we were shown a feature that would let us do some formatting of our 
> pages.  I understand the desire to make all TC home pages look similar, 
> but it seems we now have almost no control over what info is presented 
> on our main page.  How will we get notes, announcements, etc. added?  It 
> seems REALLY inconvenient to have to put important TC info into a 
> document and put it in the repository or create a dummy "event" to get 
> something displayed.

We're putting together a template for a new TC public page that will be 
based on the current TC page but with a lot of dynamic information from 
the Kavi database. The page that you see in Kavi is the private TC 
members page. The content that you don't see on the Kavi page will 
appear on the public page.

> Here's some wishlist items:
> 1.    Actually, I *really* don't like having to click on a link for a 
> PDF file just to see the charter.  Can't we get inline text for this?

HTML should probably work. As above, I'm trying to manage this piece of 
information without disrupting your ability to manage other bits. 
Apparently the first scheme I came up with wasn't perfect :-) Let me 
work on this some more.

> 2.    On the Charter and Chairs page, it would be nice to be able to 
> list other important TC member roles (e.g. secretary, etc). Can't this 
> content be under our control?

I'll ask Kavi if this is possible.

> 3.    When managing rosters:
> a.    I would find it quite convenient to be able to do a search for 
> anyone that is a "voting member".  It lets me search on a specific role 
> or on some name/email string, but I can't directly find who can vote.  I 
> can find all members in each role and then sort each of those pages on 
> the "voting member" column, but that's a pain.

I'll ask Kavi if this is possible.

> b.    I noticed that it is possible to set an "observer" to "voting 
> member" status.  Do TC rules permit this?  Shouldn't this be explicitly 
> prohibited to prevent data entry/modification errors?

We'll have additional functionality added to the Kavi system before the 
launch that will convert a prospective member (in the Observer role) to 
a member after they have waited 60 days/3 meetings. So you wouldn't 
normally have to do this yourself. But I think that chairs need some 
latitude to override things, so we haven't removed your ability to 
change this role manually.

> c.    During the training, I asked about being able to track members on 
> Leave of Absence.  It was suggested to just move them to an observer 
> role and move them back to member when they return.  This may become 
> tedious and error prone.  And since OASIS has rules about membership 
> status and LOA, it seems the system intended to help us manage 
> membership should support that as well.  It seems we won't be able to 
> get away from using our current TC membership spreadsheet since we make 
> an entry when someone goes on LOA with the date that they left and when 
> they'll return.

I'm not sure that there is anything here that could be automated other 
than a reminder to the chair for when to convert that back to full 
membership status. And LOAs occur seldom enough (or am I wrong?) that 
it's probably not something that we want to spend resources building.

> d.    I also don't recall whether the system will manage the transition 
> from prospective member to voting member.  Will it?  If not, we also 
> have to still track that manually with our spreadsheet as well.

Yes, as I said above. A person will sign up for the TC, be made a 
prospective member and assigned an Observer role, then converted to 
Member after 60 days or three meetings. (This is another reason that you 
need to keep track of meeting attendance. Only meetings that achieve 
quorum count as valid meetings, and the number of valid meetings is used 
to calculate the three meeting rule.)

> e.    It would be VERY nice if the system remembered more 
> "preferences".  For example, I prefer to always view the full roster. 
> But every time I make a roster modification it reverts to the paginated 
> view and I have to re-click the "All" link.

I'll pass this suggestion on to Kavi.

> 4.    On pages that let you make edits and submit the changes, a nice 
> usability feature is to put a SUBMIT button on both the TOP and the 
> bottom of the section being edited.  It speeds up data updates when the 
> item you changed was near the top of the list.  Otherwise you edit the 
> item and then have to scroll to the bottom to submit the changes.

I'll pass this suggestion on to Kavi.



Kelvin Lawrence wrote:

 > 1. I agree with everything Rob said on the Charter page. Please can we
 > have an HTML link to the HTML version of the charter off the charter
 > page. We have that today so not having it in the new system is a step
 > backwards. Requiring PDF is not really acceptable, not all people have
 > PDF support.

Sounds like this is going to be a better way to do this.

 > 2. Also on the Charter page, please can we have the other officials
 > listed, especially the secretary, but also web-master and issues list
 > tracker would be nice. We list those on our current (old) web page.

Not necessarily on the charter page, but everywhere where the chair is 
listed we should also list the secretary. We don't have a role for 
webmaster though, so in the database they would just be another 
secretary, but I don't know that we'll need TC webmasters any more.

 > 4. Can we get more control over how the pages are laid out ? I had
 > raised this at the Baltimore meeting and I thought there was some
 > flexibility. The pages look rather clumsy - certainly less approachable
 > than the hand crafted pages we have today.

As I said above, we'l have a public page that looks very similar to the 
TC page today, then will have the addiitonal Kavi page for members only.

 > There does not appear to be any way for me to add special announcements
 > and messages to the my TC's home page. It would appear that the Group
 > Info section is where that would go but as chairs we do not have editor
 > access to this. This is a real problem.

As above, I've used the Group Notes and Group Descriptions for the blurb 
and charter; I'll have to rethink this.


-Karl