Write User Intro/Documentation

[lallmon]

I've been looking for a solution to scheduling a very laissez-faire volunteer organization.

I don't really understand the use of this. For instance, I went to try and make a schedule for a position in an area, but I couldn't change the schedule for that scheduling period.

I'm not exactly understanding it's intended use. Could you write up a small page about the concepts? I believe I am trying to shoehorn your software into my needs, and it might not work that way.

Great call on the Pagoda quick start. :dancers:

[maxfierke]

Hey, thanks for looking into OpenSkedge!

The idea behind OpenSkedge is based on scheduling employees based on their availability. The original use-case was for scheduling student workers in the Carlson School IT Student Services' labs and helpdesk.

The workflow was designed to mimic that of Employee Scheduler, an archaic application that was needing to be replaced. The workflow worked in the following way:

1. Supervisor defines a schedule period (e.g. a semester)
2. Employees input their availability (along with their preference) for the scheduling period.
3. Supervisor schedules employees based on their availability & preferences (and is only able to schedule people who are available for each time segment)

This differs from a number of scheduling applications which are based on defining specific shifts (i.e. 8am - 12pm, 12pm-4pm,etc.). While many businesses or organizations work this way, such as your local sandwich shop, academic institutes such as the University of Minnesota do not. Student workers have classes to work around, and it can quickly become tedious and complicated to define all the shifts around students.

Over a year has past since the design and most of the implementation of OpenSkedge. I've gotten a lot of feedback and done a lot of my own analysis on the good & bad in OpenSkedge. I'm in the process of making a roadmap for an OpenSkedge 2.0. Part of this includes implementing a number of different scheduling workflows to support more organizations. If OpenSkedge 1.0 does not fully meet your requirements, I encourage you to keep an eye on OpenSkedge & join the discussion about 2.0 when the time comes.