Hello,
I’m assisting an association in organizing an event for experimental archaeology, and I recently created a group to assess if Karrot could meet our needs.
I believe Karrot is a great match, but I still have some questions.
The association aims to recreate an antique battle between two hoplite formations colliding with each other, with one fleeing, in order to study how this scenario could have unfolded.
The goal is to gather 800 volunteers, train each of them in local groups across France before the main event, which will span over a few days.
Upon reviewing groups on Karrot, I’ve noticed some with more than a hundred members. However, I would like to inquire about experiences with groups exceeding 500 members, particularly in terms of performance and organization.
Also, what would be the most effective approach to organize sub-groups for volunteer training before the event? I’m having difficulty finding features to differentiate between members or manage member rights. I assume I could request group leaders to incorporate a prefix in their names to aid in identification, but perhaps I overlooked something?
Thanks for reading me !
Dear @Holmeron
this sounds so great! I don’t know much about archaeology, but we’d be very happy to have you 
How did you find out about Karrot in the first place?
It’s true that most of our groups are below 500 members. In fact, I don’t recall a group being larger. We recently had one of the bigger groups starting their own instance (Luxembourg) and having several sub-groups. So there certainly is the question about having a single Karrot group or multiple groups for each sub-group.
In your case, I think you’d be fine having a single Karrot group overall and using the places to organise the sub-groups. E.g. I imagine a place for the main event and then places for each local group. Each place can have their own activities and communication on the respective wall. Only the main wall is across all places. Every member would need to mark the places as ‘favorite’ which are relevant for them to not miss updates. We don’t have sub-places though.
As for performance, @nicksellen do you think there might be an issue with such a large group?
We don’t have a feature (yet) that indicates roles of group members like group leader etc. Using the profile could work for that e.g. adding a prefix to your name as you suggested or adding information in the ‘About you’ section. The roles we do have are Newcomer and Editor, and a bit more recently Approved. So when it comes to managing member rights, that’s what our trust system does. Read more about it here: [Info] Karrot trust system and user levels It means that groups members can give each other trust and as soon as someone got 3 trust, they’re editor. To account for misuse, we have a very transparent history. You can learn more about the advanced feature ‘Approved’ here.
I’d be very interested in your experience using Karrot, so I’m happy to continue chatting here or having a call at some point
Nathalie
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Hello Nathalie and thanks for your answer.
I’ve been familiar with Karrot for quite some time but never had the chance to test the platform. I work for a company that aims to enhance civic engagement and promote circular economy practices in the Netherlands, so we are well-versed in digital solutions within this sector.
I have a meeting scheduled with the association this week to discuss Karrot and another solution for their project. With the feedback you’ve provided, I feel equipped with all the necessary information.
I’ll tell you how it went !
Arnaud
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I can give a bit more info, I’m the main developer at the moment.
You might want to consider running your own instance, at your own domain name. I can imagine if there were an additional 800 active users it would notable increase the strain on our hosted instance, which we provide on a best-effort basis for free, within our restricted capacities.
One of the performance bottlenecks at the moment for larger groups, or users in lots of groups, is that the frontend requests quite a lot of information from the backend when it first loads (all the groups/users/places) - this was fine when the numbers were small, but gets slower over time. It’s totally solvable, just a time/resources question.
If you were to use Karrot do you also have capacity to contribute time/resources/money? It’s not required, but can help if your needs go beyond what we already are able to offer. I say this with awareness of my limited capacity for additional work beyond what I am already doing.
Let us know how your deliberations go, whatever the outcome!
You’re also welcome to join a call with us to discuss further, that’s often a very useful way to engage
Hello everyone,
The association, while wanting to favor open-source solutions, ultimately chose a different option due to concerns about Karrot’s trust-based permission system. This, combined with a few other factors, made the alternative solution a better fit for their project’s specific needs.
They’re actively searching for funding to cover most of the cost of this project, this is why we searched for free solutions. Hosting our own instance of Karrot and changing the permission system, while possible (I’m a Django dev 
) was too time consuming and costly at this stage !
Thanks for you help and feedback
Arnaud
Thanks for letting us know the outcome - by the way are you able to share with us the option you did go with? Would be interesting for me, even your evaluation points of the options if were happy to share that.
We do have some upcoming work for adding more fine grained roles and permissions, from our recently nlnet funding Application to NLnet Entrust - attempt 2 - #7 by nicksellen - although it still might not be suitable there.
Anyway, I hope your project goes well, and thanks for considering us 