Behaviour for 0-participant activities

Feedback and ideas
1

User story:
In our karrot team & feedback group we sometimes create reminder/ ‘review’ activities which don’t need any participants.
In this usecase of Support common usage of shared resources in a group when booking a resource, it won’t need participants either. In another group for example I’m trying karrot for coordinating room usage of a shared space. Some events need a coordinator present, others don’t (or the person is not in the karrot group, hence won’t sign-up for an activity - which is fine).

Also the logic of karrot can be discussed here.
Current behaviour is:

  • you set number of participants to 0 (not field empty, as that’s count as unlimited)
  • no slots are shown on activity
  • you can still sign up!
  • it is not showing when filter activities for ‘with free slots’
  • it does show when filter activities for ‘only empty’
  • not sure about all the email notification, but there are emails connected (either as missed activities or upcoming activities with no participants)

Complexity: medium

Outcomes (or what needs to be done to move forward):
I think there is a case to say that when setting participants intentionally to 0, that that’s what the software should consider!

  • not allow signing up (not just greyed out, but won’t show button I’d say)
  • not count as missed
  • is it a new filter category? technically they are ‘empty’ but intentionally empty, and I think that filter option is mostly used for activities that are meant to have people but no one signed up yet. So this one is not really empty in that thinking. What could be a good name for this one?

The only thing I like is this design of signing up without having predefined slots. Sometimes I find it tricky to set a good amount of slots if it’s really ‘all is welcome’ and the unlimited slots look a bit odd to me. But I would neglect this comment in favour of implementing this change to have 0-participant activities.

1 Like
2

Another angle on this which is a slightly different approach: When reviewing the user story and thinking about this further, I noticed that what I need is an option to tell the software ‘it is ok if this activity stays empty’. That’s a bit unconnected whether I’ve created 0 slots (and what that means as discussed above) or 4 slots or unlimited slots.

For some activities there is an expectation that they are filled, for good reasons! I want to be reminded when a pick-up slot has no participants. For others it’s more flexible. Also thinking about our co-workings in the Karrot Team & Feedback group, which sometimes stay empty and that’s fine. In the case of the neighbourhood organising we don’t have everyone in the Karrot group. There are activities listed that do take place, but you don’t need to sign-up for it (e.g. an open coffee time everyone can just show up). It’s odd when it reads ‘missed activities’ in the weekly summary.

In short the idea is to have an option to say ‘allow activity to be empty’ and it needs a bit more thought about the implications (emails, filter, history, statistic).

3

maybe that’s also a beginner’s issue and we need to get everyone on the group to fill all the activities :slight_smile: