So far the roles feature has worked fine in one of the groups I am part of, which is about foodsaving. The roles are related to how we structure our organization, so there are roles for board members, for different working groups and roles tied to places, that is, people responsible for a cooperating partner or a sharing spot.
But the other use case I want to bring is different, and the roles feature has not been intuitively adopted. The case is that of a community kitchen (Folkkök), where people get together to cook from surplus food. In this type of activity, roles are not fixed, but rather connected to each activity. That is, we create slots with different participant types that correspond to each role, like helping out in the kitchen, cleaning, communication, host, etc.
It would be too much to ask people to go to roles → assign themselves the role → sign up to the activity → then unassign themselves from the role after the activity is done
In the use case above the roles are actually quite well defined and have a description. But roles descriptions are in an “agreement”
Idea for improvement
We could create a flow by which the user can click on join activity → select a type which is restricted to a role → get a dialog explaining what the role is and if the person accepts, get the role until activity is done