Enhancements to use Polls for conference scheduling

[nursoda]

Describe the goal you'd like to achieve

I'd like to use Polls for participants of a conference to pre-select which (parallel) speeches they want to attend in order to optimize which speech to put in which room (due to different room sizes).

As a poll owner, I want to allow comments of poll participants to myself as organizer. I also want to add (not-selectable) headlines (like the topic of a time slot) and subsequent speech/workshop choices.

As participant I want to vote and to leave a question to the organizer/poll owner (not all users). I may also want to remember what I chose.

Describe possible solutions

As poll creator, I'd like to be able to select whether comments should be visible to all (further) voters or just to me. If that's not too much hassle, I'd even like to be able to configure that questions shall be sent to me via email immediately (independently if whether I get sent each vote). While a simple "check box" style "Text" vote does the job, a dedicated vote type "conference tracks" (radio buttons per time slot) might be a better solution.

As participant I'd like to be able to send my selection to myself via E-Mail or to download a PDF created from my selection.

[dartcafe]

I am not sure, if pumping up the comments section is a right movement for the polls app. The current implementation is a relict from the first versions and are not intended to become a conversation tool.

Maybe it would be better to concentrate on a talk integration?

[nursoda]

That was a misunderstanding, I do not vote to enhance but to restrict it. What happened was that a participant had a question and used the comments to address it. Problem was, that all further participants voting saw his question. After pointing that out to the conference manager, she deleted it manually (and answered it). My proposal is that it should be possible to restrict whether comments are available at all or that the poll creator may restrict who sees them (in this case, herself only).

[dartcafe]

I understood that. Technically it is an enhancement.

• changing comments to public and private comments
• enhancing the model and db
• adding access checks
• identifying them as public and private for the reader
• Make sure a user can tell, if a comment is public or private
• How do we handle responses?
• Adding an answer function to prevent accidentially public answers, which are intended to be private
• test this
• adding tests
• etc.

Therefore I questioned, if it is a better idea to integrate talk for private communication in the context of a poll.

[nursoda]

Thanks for clarification and further ideas. Can't tell whether Talk should be integrated, we're not using it. For our usecase, it would not be necessary since the usual communication paths are clear (email, phone). We're not using talk since NC is not used as platform by the majority of our members but only by those actively collaborating. Polls many times, and in this case for the big events, address all members.

[dartcafe]

Can't tell whether Talk should be integrated, we're not using it.

Yes. That's what I believe is a common situation. But maybe you understand, why I have concerns expanding the communication features, since this is not the main purpose of the app inside NC.