Those of us who haven’t been blessed with Skedda access yet have basically no idea what’s going on day-to-day, and ignorance is breeding speculation.
We know the operating hours of the space, and what areas are bookable, and have a vague idea of who’s allowed to book time, but no visibility to what’s actually being booked.
What’s the utilization of the currently available time slots? Is the shop jam-packed based on current schedule restrictions?
What’s preventing us from moving to phase 2? Are our processes collapsing under the phase 1 load, or are we just waiting on a review of feedback before next steps?
It is very frustrating that 1-hour-a-month members aren’t even allowed to see what’s happening. If phase 2 opening isn’t imminent, I agree with @BrianBowles that we need to start talking about a “phase 1.5” option. It’s not cool to block out casual users indefinitely while asking them to keep paying dues in hopes of one day being able to use the space again.
I, too, am getting kind-of frustrated with the lack of visibility. I have this ongoing sense that I’m not subscribed to the right email lists, reading the correct groups, or failing at reading comprehension of the guides published for reopening.
For example, it was news to me just now that May 29th was the start of Phase 2 (I think? I learned this from a pinned post in the “COVID Time” section of yo . atxhs . org). Cool. How far in advance was this decided, and where did I miss that announcement? I’m absolutely willing to acknowledge that I’m a “casual” that often gets surprised by meetings notes that get posted after a ATXHS meeting. My personal suggestion is that if something is announced, the exact same message should be repeated multiple times (maybe in multiple venues, e.g., an email list, the Google Groups, a specific post on here). More than that, and it’s on the member for not receiving.
Reading through “Phase 2” of the ATXHS Reopening Plan, I see that I should request to join a “haxor” group at yo . atxhs . org, where I’m told to “set your name to the name on your membership form”. Why is this convoluted? What I’m asking is: Is Skedda fragile? Does it not support a read-only mode?
My impression is that there is a protective circle formed around the new online scheduling system for a reason I don’t understand. Why can’t anyone just view Skedda? I’m not proposing a change to procedure, I don’t have enough information to understand why all members in good standing aren’t given access to view by default.
Hopefully this doesn’t come across as performative complaining. If you think I can do something to help with these issues, go ahead and turn that work right-around back on me. Thanks.
I’m speaking as an outside observer. I’m not in the meetings. Or in the conversations revolving around this.
I dont think it’s any malicious intent that this information isn’t being shared. But more we dont have these procedures in place and trying to developer them. Share them. Teach them. Monitor them, all while still holding day jobs.
We need more volunteers to help, and give a consistent message and method of communication.
Right now there are just so many directions were trying to go with all the different people pulling in their direction.
We are still trying to figure this out. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s not going to be fast. So please try to bare with us.
There is a re-opening team for people to help in these indevours, I’m trying to get some information and I’ll make a post about it shortly
Hey @Ross, thanks for bringing your perspective forward. I often feel like a broken record because I do post things many times in multiple places and I think a big problem is getting everyone in the right communication channels then battling email filters. I just made a new category in Operations called Updates where I will post links to the Mailchimp updates we have sent out for anyone that misses those.
The big underlying problem with both email communications and Skedda onboarding is that our operational infrastructure is and has been a fragmented mess for a long long time (maybe always?). Because our systems are so broken, there isn’t a very easy way for us to add all paying members directly to the Skedda. We don’t even have a good accounting system for the true absolute count of members given that some members are added as family to a single account, much less an email address to associate with those add-on members which could be used to add them into Skedda. There is no centralized ATXHS database of members (I really want to make one though).
The not being able to see the Skedda without having an account is due to the settings available in Skedda and to a degree respect for member’s privacy so their personal contact info is not being shared by us on the web. We are listed as a private venue in Skedda which means our calendar isn’t open for just anyone on the web to book on. This is important because we are restricted to members only. We also have it set to where non-admin users are not able to see other members personal information (this is unfortunately just togglable as “see all details” or “see title only” which is why we’ve asked members to put contact info in the title of their bookings if they are OK with being contacted by another member should that be needed).
Given all that and the fact that not all members are even interested in booking time at the moment, we went with this route of using Discourse and the hax0r group to give a direct link for joining Skedda. We have a team of Discourse admins who have been given a list of names for dues paying members to help facilitate quick response times for membership requests and as soon as someone joins, they have the Skedda link right there in the group messages. This seemed like the simplest, quickest way for us to help people move to two new systems (Discourse and Skedda) that we will continue using moving forward beyond the current pandemic.
Hopefully that helps clear up your questions around this. There are certainly other approaches and I’m still very avid about cleaning up our operational infrastructure so that all this sort of thing is incredibly simple in the future, but that project will take some time and we were looking for a quicker approach to get people on both these platforms.
