User Roles

sounds good.

I like it this too. An extra field (on the group memebership) that gets formated with the user name on the group page list of members.

User tags! The request on everyone's lips!

I had the same thought yesterday. Excuse me while I flesh it out for a minute...

Example

See this discussion, where a bunch of timebank coordinators around the country got together to say "I have the delegated responsibility to represent this region and participate in this decision."

It made me think, "What could Loomio do to better facilitate this process?"

First iteration

As suggested, User Titles would be a good place to start.

Future thinking

In the future I can imagine 'official' User Titles, that can only be assigned to group members through a consensus process: e.g. the Wellington Timebank group would get together and decide that Hannah should receive the official title of 'Delegate'.

Holding the official title would give the user special privileges in certain circumstances. E.g. the National Timebank group could be set up to allow comments from any Regional Timebank member, but only allow votes from those that hold the official User Title of Delegate.

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Reframing the question

For me, the big question used to be "How can we increase the maximum workable group size on Loomio?" Seeing user behaviour like this lately has lead me to ask a different question: "how we can get these groups to work together effectively?"

First iteration

In addition to the above, another obvious win is to give groups the option of a 'Join' button, so anyone can participate.

Future thinking

The 'Join' button ties in with the User Titles idea. I imagine anyone could Join a group, and they'd be given a User Title like 'Guest', which allows them to post comments but not participate in decisions. They could then be promoted to a fully-fledged member through some sort of group process.

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Sorry for the rant, I just needed to get this out somewhere! I don't expect us to worry about the future suggestions anytime soon, I just wanted to do a brain-dump of my current thinking.

Yeah, I can imagine this being quite useful when viewing a discussion in a group that you're new to.

I like your thinking @richardd.bartlett.

Point of something: We're mixing terms of role and title. Does it matter? (5 seconds consideration please)

What about if people choose their own role and admins/facilitators approve them?

As a starting point I reckon the idea of a basic user tag system where anyone can put a couple of words in a field that's linked to their name sounds awesome - something super basic and flexible, so we can see how groups actually want to implement it.

I really like Richard's idea for the future - would be rad to be able to invite new users to participate in different capacities, each associated with different rights (i.e. choice between "Invite Jon Lemmon as Guest" or "Invite Jon Lemmon as Member" - where Guests can comment but not decide, and Members have full participation in decision).

Does that make sense?

Ugh Tags again! (pet peeve! sorry, laugh at me @benjaminknight et al )

Let me go over my vision for this feature:

I think that some's 'Title' should not have any meaning in terms of their ability to administer a group - It's a string of text that helps identify them within their community.

Their title is a property of their group membership, so you can have a title per group which you belong to.

This design would be very simple to implement.

A more advanced version of this might include an approval feature - Where group admins approve changes to someone's title before they take effect.

@benjaminknight I think 'guest' and 'member' might be confusing title examples as we need to distinguish between someones title and their admin status.

Inviting people with a title predefined would indeed be nice.

@robertguthrie My gut reaction says "role" seems a bit more specific than "title", which seems nice ("What is your role in this group?).

So starting out, does just a bit of text that sits to the right of the username seem like a good place to start? No immediate need for "official" roles yet...

I think it could be almost immediately useful for providing context to a conversation.

Yep. I think we've got it.

I can see 3 mockups neeeded:

• Role alongside names in discussions
• Role with names in Group page
• Role fields for each group you belong to in your Profile/Settings page

Btw.. I think that we should rename 'Settings' to 'Profile' in the top right dropdown.

Do we know of anyone wanting and entry level task for loomio coding? This would be a good one. @benjaminknight @jonlemmon

Depending on how entry level this is, you could the interns group on it maybe? The interns might be interested in being trained on making good mockups, as a starting point.

Yep absolutely @alannakrause mockups are a great starting point.

Good call @alannakrause. I've put a message on Yammer to ask if any interns want to pick this up.

@minh and I are interested ... can we organise a meet up to figure out how to move fwd on this?

I've just invited @minhha and @johnirving to our balsamiq account. =)

@minhha and @johnirving you can start by drawing up mockups for the feature (I'd recommend starting a new project - make sure you set it to public).

Then once there is a sense that the design is right, you can move onto coding.

Just a clarification to Rich's comment: it's a good idea to post mockups to Loomio and get the group's OK before you do any coding (just in case the group has something different in mind than what you have in mind).

ok here's a start following @robertguthrie s suggested pages.
https://loomio.mybalsamiq.com/projects/userrolestitles/grid
discuss?

First thoughts:

Group page member list - you're going to have to limit character count pretty harshly to make that format work.

Settings page - how do we explain to the user the concept of per-group titles? Also I think per-sub-group might be overkill, though I'm open to be corrected on that.

Also thanks for taking this on John! I hope it's a fun process even though it's not the most exciting feature :)

thanks for the feedback. see benefit of this process already.

Settings Page

agree on overkill... the default inheritance might remedy that though if it was wanted as a feature.
Perhaps teach users implicitly by leaving little breadcrumbs? like on a discussion page have :hover behaviour on their default and slightly transparent/ title? having said that i like the idea of default being blank :S

Group Page

i think the titles should be short anyway, so like the idea of smaller+shorter text (Group Admin seems to read fine and the size makes it ancillary to user name)

thought - how do we navigate someone being a Group Admin (which is a specific loomio group role) & a specific role e.g. Dev
maybe a symbol next to name, or emboldening to signify admin? >Aaron *Aaron ~Aaron

For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to continue to use 'title' to refer to a user-defined descriptor (e.g. "community manager") and 'role' to refer to a permission level (e.g. "group admin"). I'm not attached to these words but it's important to keep the concepts distinct (at this stage at least).

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By overkill I mean, nobody has asked for per-subgroup titles yet so let's build it as per-group and see how many people ask us to extend it. Principle: aim to give the user the fewest number of options necessary to have a good experience (but no fewer!)

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Agree default should be blank - as a general principle it is nice if we can add features in a way that is invisible to people that don't care about them. Which probably rules out leaving hints. Perhaps in future it would be nice to have an interface where everything you see can be edited in place, but for now I think we should just worry about the settings page. Specifically, what wording should we use?

For any form you can have a heading, label, placeholder, and helper text (e.g. see the 'create new proposal' form for an example with all four kinds of text). This is when balsamiq's editor starts coming in handy, to give you a feel for the actual UI.

Consider also that some users have one group and some have many.

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Maybe the title should be short, I don't know, but you need to make sure your design takes into account that some users will have long names.

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The current mockup for the group page doesn't take into account what the member list looks like to a group admin i.e. this. Either we'll need to add an extra line per user (yuck) or we'll have to put the role and or the title one click further away, (e.g. the email address being displayed in a popover when you click a user's name).

Changing how roles are displayed means you'll also have to change how they are assigned. I may be wrong but my instinct would be to look for a way to add titles without changing anything about how we do roles. Of course, we don't necessarily have to display both titles and roles in this list.

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p.s. nitpick fyi in this context 'breadcrumbs' refers to a particular style of navigation e.g. home > loomio community > features

p.p.s. we've tried to avoid :hover thus far as it doesn't play well with touchscreens

p.p.p.s. excuse my prolixity, I'm trying to demonstrate how many million things you have to consider just to get the tiniest change designed right!

yeah cool.
ok, so we need to decide on how many characters we're gonna restrict names to ? and titles.
I don't want to disrespect anyone with long names but I think without some upper limit this will be hard to design.

that or make the restrictive groups user-list div more flexible *shudder...

i propose making the (admin) role denoted by an underline or a symbol pre/post name or something (and removing the role descriptions from the user-list on group page altogether?
pros/ cons?

it seems like that, or have the admins corralled in a super-section ensconced in their lofty role by some ---------

Thanks for doing these mockups John! It makes things way easier to talk about.

I agree that we should think about a max size for names and certainly for titles. Perhaps we should keep names fairly long though (and resort to truncating if needed).

Anyway, my one concern with the design as it stands here is the settings page. We're starting to get a few "per-group" settings now, and I'm not sure that we want to always display a list of all the user's groups any time they want to change something on a per-group basis. My inclination is to favour putting per-group settings inside the actual group. So in this case, we could leave a small link to the right of the user's name on the discussion page. I know that this is a bit more complex on the front-end design side-of-things, but I think otherwise we'll be starting to compromise UX on the settings page. Here's a mockup of what this could look like.

I also agree that we should leave sub-group-specific titles out for now, and that we should avoid putting the title directly on the member list and instead put it in the user pop-over (when you click the user's name).

My only other reservation in thinking about this a bit more is that it could be pretty drastic having a big clunky title next to the user's name all the time. From an identity perspective it could be kind of weird. I guess there's only one way to find out. Perhaps one way to deal with this is to be really strict on the title char count limit.

I have to say the more I think on it the more I just want to put the title in the popover and nowhere else.

"I imagine anyone could Join a group, and they'd be given a User Title like 'Guest', which allows them to post comments but not participate in decisions. They could then be promoted to a fully-fledged member through some sort of group process."

Bettermeans does that, but sadly isn't really maintained anymore.

This isn't really directly about roles/ titles, but since @richarddbartlett sort of mentioned it at the beginning of the discussion I thought I'd mention it here for good measure (it is about roles in the wider sense, which is what he seemed to be responding to).

United Diversity is about to re-incorporate as a mult-stakeholder co-operative using these excellent rules: http://somerset.coop/somersetrules

In the UK, these are, imho, by far the best off the shelf legal structure.

They allow you to create define different stakeholder groups and to allocate a percentage of the vote to each.

During day to day operations, this doesn't really affect too much, because we plan to have a sociocratic style bunch of double linked self-organised circles who are empowered to act autonomously within defined limits.

However, it be great to be able to use Loomio for having online AGMs / whole co-op meetings when directors are elected etc.

In the case of UD we're thinking of having 4 stakeholder groups:

Workers
Enterprises
Customers
Investors

Each with 25% of the vote. I'd be awesome if Loomio could handle this, i.e. know which stakeholder group within United Diversity each member is in and tally up the votes accordingly.

Hey @josefdaviescoates great to see you mention the Somerset rules. I really like the concept of multi-stakeholder co-operatives.

I also think it would "be great to be able to use Loomio for having online AGMs / whole co-op meetings when directors are elected etc.".

I know Co-operatives UK were working with a London based open source project One Click Org http://www.oneclickorgs.com/. It was working on both doing the legal formation work and the running of organisations using electronic methods. I tried to contact the One Click Org in the past but got no response. Their listserv looks somewhat inactive so I have no idea what has happened.

hey @neilmorris I think oneclickorgs are great, but they are under resourced. AFAIK there is one person working on the digital IPS project in their spare time, and it wouldn't be suitable for the Somerset Rules. It is for CoopUK's so-called multistakeholder rules, but all those rules do is allow you to define different stakeholder groups, membership of which entitles people to join. But it then lumps them all together for decision making purposes, so not really a multi-stakeholder co-op at all. The code is on github here: https://github.com/oneclickorgs/one-click-orgs/tree/coop

PS @neilmorris this hasn't even been announced yet, but you can take a peek at the platform here: http://create.oneclick.uk.coop/coops/intro ;)