New feature: Invite people directly into a thread or decision
Robert Guthrie PublicSeen by 94We're happy to introduce some new features which we think you'll find super useful:
- You can now invite people directly into threads or polls (or proposals), without them joining your group.
- You have control over who gets notified when you create a thread or poll or outcome.
Now when you create a group, thread, proposal or outcome, you'll see an invitation screen like this (for a group):
or this (for a proposal):
This form lets you select exactly who to notify about (or invite to join) your newly created group, thread, poll or outcome.
An important change to note: unless you select people to notify, nobody will get an immediate notification - which may be what you want. People will still see the new activity in their "Yesterday on Loomio" email and within the app.
To make notifying specific groups of people easy, you can choose from predefined audiences, such as "everyone in the thread" or "people who have not voted". Alternatively, you can enter individuals by name or email address and they'll get an email that brings them into the thing in question so they can participate right away.
The other great thing about this feature is that you can invite people who are not members of your group directly into your discussions and decisions. They'll get an email allowing them to participate immediately, but they won't get access to the rest of your group. This is useful in cases where you need to invite an external expert into a specific discussion.
With this feature delivered, we're closer to being able to support private threads (person to person, without a group) - so expect to see that soon.
Of course, we'd love to hear what you think about this feature. Please leave feedback in this thread. Thanks for using Loomio. 😀
‘Hack for grouping information’ . . I think the functionality you’re speaking of @strypey is in the Gold Loomio package, where tags can be created. Just a handful of colours, unlimited (?) number of categories - the limit being, how much classification labour your community’s coordinators feel like putting in. In my main current group I can see this being used a lot, bcos we’re seeking to develop an analysis - shared system of categories (tags) themes (topic-threads) and detailed cases/descriptions (in comments).
BTW I’m replying via email bcos unable to find your comment via the ‘view it on Loomio’ link in the notification email. I guess there are too many collapsed sections of the thread for it to be easily findable by eye? There’s an issue here about searching within threads, which I’ll post as a feature request (again) in this thread. Also . . this email response will appear as a response to the main thread, unhelpfully not connected with your comment as I would do if I could find it. I’ll post this too, for a fix.
I understand the vision and use case for groupless discussions and decisions, but I find it really odd to get an email notification stating I am invited to join a discussion that belongs to a group I'm already a member of, and to get a navbar notification for a new discussion, which I already can see and access through "Unread threads (xx)" in the sidebar... For a user in conventional group use-case, this is quite puzzling.
It's not very different to the old behaviour, the old "announcement" checkbox would send an email and create an in app notification - the only thing that has changed is it says "invited you to join" rather than just "started a discussion". Is it just a language thing?
Yes, for the first email notification issue, it is a wording/concept of joining problem. But for the second issue, I don't recall and can't find older navbar notifications for a new discussion, which duplicate "Unread threads (xx)" in the sidebar.
The language implies I can leave the thread, or refuse to join it, which should have implications for what notifications I receive.
Is it me or was the group membership page that allowed a coordinator to keep track and act upon the list of members replaced by a 5 then 20-paginated column lacking the location info that was added a few months ago, while taking more space on every discussion pages? Can't find the page anymore...
Yep. That's what happened. It's not a big deal to make it a page again. our operating mode is that we do the minimum until someone makes some noise about something being missing.
@robertguthrie It would be good to have that page back again. It was more convenient that the current group-page pane, which closes again when returning to the page, and may need several clicks to reveal the full list, if the list is long and the person you're interested in joined way back.
i think this new feature is causing bugs maybe...
when i try to @tag someone, something weird happens
first the people in the group whose names start/contain those letters show up - but only briefly - and are then replaced with others (who aren't in the group - but in other groups i belong to)
see screen shots below
typing @tag in this group i get the last image briefly but then the second
and sometimes the first - and it changes if i then delete or add a letter
i would rather only see people from the group i am in - having the members of other groups makes it harder to find people if you aren't certain of their @name - and as some of the groups i am in are pretty big, could this maybe be slowing things down too?)
btw - - uploading message isn't closing when copying and pasting these screengrabs
also, am happy the replies in threads are working better now :-)
:b
I like this feature a lot :) However, while the preset invitation options in a proposal are nice to have, it would be helpful to have more flexible preset options in a thread too, in addition to whole group.
Part of the background for me is a discussion about creating 'trans-groups' in Loomio. At that time @robertguthrie said here that this nice new feature would provide the functionality. It's not here yet, however. I find I'm posting things in one group (Commons Transition, say), that would be relevant to another (eg social.coop) . . . so would like to invite the members of a thread in one group to participate in a thread in the other. But the only way to do this currently would be to enter the ID of each person (yes?). Please can there be a preset that enables the entire membership of another Loomio group or thread-in-a-group to be invited to a thread in a different group? Or if not a preset (there are many threads in the Loomioverse, the list would be long!), then a naming protocol for identifying a thread whose members should be added to the invitation list (eg @reading_group@social.coop).
My original query was trigggered by something @richarddbartlett had said. D'you have a view on usefulness of this 'trans-group' capability Rich? D'you have this kind of cross-posting issue?
Right now a thread only belongs to 1 group, plus a group of guests.. It's our intention to some day enable a thread to belong to multiple groups but we don't have any significant demand for this.
Uh huh. So it's a matter of 'guesting' individuals? Thanks for clarifying Robert.
yes.
Makes sense to me in theory, though personally I don't remember ever wanting to have a 2-group conversation.
My thought originally arose bcos you wrote about higher-level linkages across local political groups in Spain, and some kind of hack that was done at the time.
Just you wait!!