nextcloud
meeting proposal: allow to create a public link so that random external people can participate in the date finding process
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When I invite other people to find a joint date I often don't know how many people from the other organization will participate. Therefore it is more or less impossible to invite them in advance one-by-one by adding them to the "meeting proposal" explicitly with their email address.
Additionally a automatically generated mail might be confusing for some recipients. I might prefer to send them the link in a personal mail adding some context what the meeting is for and what I expect from them.
Describe the solution you'd like
The user should be able to create a public link for a "meeting proposal", this link can than be send to external people. Once they open the link they should have a option to enter their name and than participate in the process of finding a meeting date. Similar how public polls work.
Describe alternatives you've considered
For the generic mail part I could of course send a personal mail mentioning that they should have received a mail from Nextcloud and what the mail is about. But this is not really convenient, neither for the sender nor for the recipient.
For the other problem, that I don't know all the external people who should join the meeting and their email address because I have just one contact person at the other organization is something I can't solve without a generic public link as described above.
Additional context
No response
Hey, @schiessle
Finally had time to read through your comments.
To summarize your suggestions, and some thoughts and explanations.
- you would like to have a "open" meeting proposal that users can invite them self's to.
- this is possible without making to many changes, although the original idea was for this to be used to find a date with people you specifically want to have the meeting with. That said, we could add a option on the creation screen to make it a open proposal, that removes the mandatory participant selection, then the organizer would select the dates/times. Then we could add a public facing self invitation screen, where anonymous users can add their details, and are forwarded to the voting screen once they have entered their details.
- you would like to have a link you can copy to send in a email.
- this one is a bit more complex, the links are generated on a per user basis, so that we can track which user is voting, without the user entering their own details, for convenience (click the link in the email and select your response), as the original idea was to have private meeting proposals. That said, if we did implement a "open/public" proposal configuration, we could then generate a link for the entire proposal, that can be copied and sent in a message.
Lets ask design and the originator of this idea what they think
@nimishavijay @ericfischereu
Isn't the first idea already covering all requirements @SebastianKrupinski ? I'd say only sending links to existing users is not a real use case, so anyone participating via link only should be treated as anonymous.
I don't see any problem in automatic emails, since normal calendar invites also create automatic mails and they do not look very different.
@SebastianKrupinski aren't 1 and 2 essentially the same for the user? UX wise this is how I imagine it:
For the organizer:
- allow to set as a public meeting proposal when they are setting it up
- once they are done prompt to share the link with others
- in the overview add a "copy link" secondary button next to edit and delete
- possibly have a "close poll" option in the overview
receiver:
- once they receive the link from the organizer clicking on it opens a screen to fill out their personal details like name and email
- after filling out they can vote as usual
Possible challenges:
- we will never know when the proposal is "complete" as we don't know how many will respond
Does that make sense?
@nimishavijay yes, makes totally sense to me. Drawback for the open votes is of course that we can not say automatically when everyone voted. For closed votes we could inform the owner that now everyone has voted and/or automatically pick a date and send the invitation to everyone. Having both options would be nice (closed votes and open/public votes). From my day to day experience of inviting or getting invited to meeting I would probably use the open/public vote most of the time because this matches reality most of the time, imho.
I just have a question. Why did you implement the feature, while you have a complete backend with the Polls app, which delivers all those features? Especially because an integration of Polls into the calendar is a long wanted feature, which I was not really able to accomplish using the public API.
Since I learned appointment proposals had been integrated into the calendar, I wonder to abandon Polls and use my time for better things.
CC @AndyScherzinger Mothers eating their children?
Hi @dartcafe
I am very sorry tings went this way communication and collaboration-wise (or that lack of both really) and comment on the final question: no plan, no intention to eat the children / hurt the community and ecosystem.
Unfortunately there is a lack of a detailed paper-trail on the feature's discussion and decisions to get a very clear and detailed picture of why exactly it took this route.
What I have seen and have been told is that there has been the discussion around using polls and align about that with you personally. This obviously didn't happen but I don't know why. In some way since I might be one of the closest people to you do to our discussions around polls or maybe Hamza with his contribution it could be that it was on me and I failed to do so by having forgotten about (since I can't remember this, so might be wrong might be right, pure guess on my end).
There have also been general discussion with several developers and also designers to have a platform-provided / supported way to make it easier to plug apps into other apps which this would have a a great example for. Yet we lack such a solution so the usual default approach is to not rely on a combination of apps because it adds dependencies between apps that the platform has no solution in place to ensure compatibility, so it is something we also try to avoid when possible. Another example of a polls scenario was or would have been using it in Talk instead of the small polls-logic now shipping with Talk itself (while you can still post polls-polls into a talk room of course) where we lack things like a "backend-only mode", think: use polls for calendar and talk, but don't offer the app's general frontend, but only the backend (as an example).
Another aspect it the route take I think, discussion is around the calendar as the point of entry, so with a lack of awareness when discussion the solution I expect most devs to look for an "in-app" solution, especially given the thoughts and stater from above regarding not integrating apps' on API-level into each other for above dependency issue.
None of the above point make it a right or wrong approach from my perspective, just one legit way, the same way having used thew polls app as the backbone for "finding a date"-part would have been equally fine and legit.
There is no intention to hurt the polls app or any other app and there is also no plan or thought about replacing any existing app or build a competing one. Nextcloud is also about choice, so having several app offering similar or the same functionality is seen as fine, think the Photos app and Memorize.
So again, I am sorry for the way things went and turned out. I think this doesn't means the polls app could not provide the same or similar feature with polls as an entry point and I am happy to discuss the things missing on the calendar app side in order for a polls app (or any other where creating events would be beneficial) to enable developer to implement such a feature while in parallel thinking about how or if this can be achieved in a way not causing an unmanaged app dependency nightmare which is the number one reason against doing such integrations, at least for the moment.
I hope this provides some explanation and I am here and happy to keep discussing the matter and see how things can be improved around collaboration, communication and integration/reuse aspects. If I am the mother in this metaphor, I definitely don't want to it any children especially not one like you and your polls app who and which are very dear to me and well established in the ecosystem as an app and I value the conversations we also had in the past 🙏
