Change to how Inbox works in Loomio Beta

@alanna and @joshuavial keen to hear what you two think.

@robertguthrie, thanks! I have a few points:

• I think it would be good if an edited context panel in a discussion also showed up as new activity. I don't think it does now, but in our group (at least) we insert any important evolution of the situation there.

• Would it be possible to have the inbox icon at the top of the screen be a drop-down like the notifications and groups icons next to it? That way one doesn't need to jump back and forth between a given page and the inbox but can go straight to the next page that has new activity.

• And is there a notification when someone edits a comment or their vote?

(I am also having problems as of today, with the top inbox icon indicating "66" new things, but nothing in the inbox when I go to it. Perhaps it's a temporary hitch due to the changes you are making.)

@olover yea. I would like to hear from others about the editing context being 'salient'. Edits can be a bit boring (eg: fixing typos).. but they can also be super interesting.. appending an update to something. I wonder if we want to differentiate between significant and insignificant edits somehow.

Thanks for the feedback about the difference between inbox counter and inbox.. I'll look into it tomorrow.

The new Loomio 1.0 interface does exactly what you want.. providing a navigation bar on the left (on desktop) or a quick dropdown on mobile. Check out www.loomio.org/angular but be warned its not ready for primetime, and we don't really want bug reports about it at this stage.

@robertguthrie thanks. Yes, I have the same doubt about salient and boring edits, which would overload people with notifications/emails.

I actually wonder if there shouldn't be either two different fields for the context panel (one for general context and one for updates), or if there can be a checkbox next to the "Update Discussion" button to indicate if that specific update is one that generates a notification or not.

Along the lines of the first option, I am thinking it could be good to have a part of the screen somewhere that can serve as a timeline or repository of links to online forms, Google Docs, and the like, maybe even as a sticky panel that stays in the user's view on the side even as (s)he scrolls down or up the screen.

I hope I'm not mentioning things that should go in another discussion thread. :-P

Maybe it's just a checkbox "notify people of this edit"?

Do you think votes without statements should be considered salient?

@robertguthrie thanks for this work

I'm trying the new inbox just now and getting this odd behaviour (see image).

I'm in favour of all context panel edits being considered salient. = simpler user interface, fewer user decisions to make, more transparency

I don't think votes without statements are salient.

@robertguthrie I wonder if making votes without statements non-salient would alleviate the pain e.g. Enspiralites are feeling on having to see participation check-in proposals over and over again?

My inbox, too, acted up with something like 65 'new messages' for a bunch of old discussions I hadn't even seen or followed. I clicked on them all to get rid of the notifications-- and in some cases, that helped me to notice awesome topics I'd never visited before.

I consider the editing of context panels to be super salient. I strongly support notifications for that.

@gregorycassel inbox (in beta) does not take notice of what you're following. Do you think it was old behaviour or new that is at fault for your situation?

@alanna and @joshuavial would you also consider a context panel edit to be something that would mark a thread as unread and add 1 to the activity count?

@robertguthrie that was a one time deal yesterday which happened sometime before you created this thread. My symptoms were similar to @olover 's : "(I am also having problems as of today, with the top inbox icon indicating “66” new things, but nothing in the inbox when I go to it. Perhaps it’s a temporary hitch due to the changes you are making.)"

Okay there is an additional symptom I forgot about @robertguthrie and it's still happening now. The Inbox seems to be showing stuff which I haven't read yet, but won't 'lead' me to those items. I can only access them by going to the Dashboard. If I click on those topics through the Dashboard links, they will then be removed from the 'count' in my Inbox.

@gregorycassel I can see that you've since zero'd your inbox. Please let me know if it happens again, and if possible leave it in the buggy state so I can examine.

@robertguthrie I have one new Inbox notification right now and it's still buggy. I will try to assist you by not clicking on that thread. :)

I think my preference would be for a tickbox option "notify the group" of an edit to the context box. Some edits are really not noteworthy, while others definitely are, and users will know best which they want. I think this would really help with noise as well, since people wouldn't only have proposals as a way to "reactivate" a discussion, and could notify the group that the context has evolved as its own thing.

Loving how this conversation is going.

@gregorycassel is it fixed now?

Seems to be working fine now yes @robertguthrie :)

Ok so I think the following things are salient:

A new discussion
New Comments
New Proposals
Proposal Outcomes
Votes with statements
Significant context and comment edits.

I have two questions.. which I can't quite figure out how to make a proposal out of so I'm just going to leave this in the discussion:

Do you think that a proposal closing in 24 hours should be salient?

Also - regarding votes: Would a block without a statement be salient? how about a no or abstain?

Should a block require a statement?

I would add to the list proposal outcomes - but I'm not sure you have or meant to make an exhaustive list of salient events (triggering a notification) anyway.

I think a proposal closing in 24 hours should be salient if the person hasn't voted yet. Or maybe in general, since it's the last opportunity to change their minds.

I would only consider a block to be salient, and I would have it require a statement (unlike yes or abstain).
But I would also require a statement for a disagree.
The reason for those two requirements is to encourage people to identify roadblocks so that the group can move forward. Otherwise people can disagree or block without contributing to a better proposal. (Of course in their voting statement they could always just say they don't have a point to contribute...)

@olover Yes. Proposal outcome is salient. I agree.
I am trying to make an exhaustive list. I'll edit my comment to reflect that.

Proposal closing soon is a bit different, and we currently use a system notification for that. I agree it's important for people to know, but I don't think it counts as salient thread activity. Using a notification and a special email, rather than activity bump seems right to me.

Thanks for your input!

@alanna , I had to think hard about your suggestion of optional notifications for context box edits. Not that my opinion especially matters, of course, but this happens to touch on some of my key theoretical concerns with respect to group process and organizational integrity.

Well, given the desire to minimize Loomio noise, I guess I'll end up agreeing with you (as usual!) However, my reasons may be atypical.

To be frank, I think that the person who makes an edit is the least qualified to judge whether or not that edit is significant. They are biased to perceive their own edit as desirable, and they may well perceive it to be less significant than others will (if others notice at all). Additionally, I can well imagine that many contentious groups may eventually use Loomio, and that they will need to deal at times with 'bad faith' participants. These participants may not genuinely believe in participatory decision making or democracy of any sort. They may seek to manipulate discussions or decisions in any way they think they can get away with, including sneakily 'reframing the debate'.

Having said all that though: Loomio keeps a clear edit history for the context box. So, I'm fairly comfortable with the idea of letting everyone decide whether or not their context-edit is worth notifying other participants about. If anyone in any group seems to edit contexts in an irresponsible manner, by that group's standards, then I guess that others will eventually notice. So, letting people decide whether or not their own edits are significant is a way of giving them a directly accountable bit of autonomy . 

I'm not a cynical person, but in the case of potential 'bad faith' participants, one could also refer to this as 'giving them enough rope'.

I realize that my organizational integrity concerns are pretty extreme, and I thank anyone who bears with my thought process here. :)

We are explicitly designing Loomio for "good faith" use cases right now. I understand concerns about high conflict situations and bad actors, but as product owner I am really clearly focusing on people who want to collaborate well together and are finding it challenging first. In my experience, most people and groups collaborate in good faith, and that's who I want to make software for. As issues come up with bad actors, we can solve them, but my sense is the good faith use case is much bigger than the conflict one.

Thanks for that perspective @alanna and it makes lots of sense. To be clear, despite being dreadfully preoccupied with anti-corruption efforts, I myself consider 'bad faith' participants to be a secondary or tertiary matter for most groups. I'm actually much more concerned with people exerting concentrated power unconsciously and invisibly, according to their personal biases and preferences. As I indicated though, I'm okay with the optional notification idea, and this issue is a thread tangent to begin with.

Thank you for your pragmatic product owner focus; I greatly appreciate it. :)

Another question for avid users!

Currently discussions will only show up in inbox if they are unread and have been active within the last 6 weeks.

Should this be shorter?

In L1.0, It could easily be a user defined period of time - defaulting at 2 weeks or something.

Tech clarification question @robertguthrie : if 1.0 makes that a user-defined option, and someone changes their setting from (say) 6 weeks to 2 weeks, would their current Inbox be affected? Or would they need to manually clear out all of the previous 'unread and somewhat recently active' messages?

(I'm thinking partly about new users for really active groups, who might be overwhelmed by their Inbox. But I'm also thinking about users in slow-moving groups.)

@gregorycassel it would take effect immediately.

The other thing I want to do/get feedback on is differentiating between reading and dismissing.

The idea being you would not "mark as read" you'd just dismiss - so newer comments would still bump a thread back into your inbox, but we would not confuse dismissed content with content you had actually read.

Thoughts?

@robertguthrie that, erm, 'Inbox sensitivity' option sounds awesome. :) I'd personally try splitting the difference with a 4 week default-- however, I've only been using Loomio since October, and other perspectives may be richer than mine.

I also think there should be an option to go into a discussion and click "star" or "add to reading list" or something like that in order to keep track of the discussions you want to go back to at some point.

Often I click on a discussion with new activity (which deletes it from my inbox), but I haven't actually read it or added my comment, which I might want to do at a later time.

@olover star discussions is in the backlog here: https://trello.com/c/Wmxi6r5J