Cool!
- naming: maybe “offers”?
- maybe this feature could be released per-group with a feature flag? then we could test it out with Solikyl and other interested groups without confusing the rest
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Yup, I like both ideas. The word “offers” also doesn’t tie it down to physical items if we want to expand the concept in the future.
Looks great!! So cool that you’re working on it, Nick!
I like the “offers” too.
And I think a chat per item would work better, rather than making it per request, so that different people can interact at the same place. It tends to make things more transparent (who’s arguing what for the request they’re making).
We should consider also if we want to make this transparent: who requests an item and which requests are accepted. We could also consider a simpler option whereby there are no requests to be formally made and accepted (just written on the item chat or privately) and the person who’s offering would be able to disable the offer as soon as s/he decides who is getting it. That is usually the way it works on sharing/donation groups on Facebook. People show their interest by replying to the post and the person who posted the offer writes when the offer is closed (ie person chosen). Facebook is obviously no good reference but it is interesting to consider the social dynamics there. There’s usually some competition about who replies “interested” first and I think we should design in such a way that hoarding behaviour is somehow discouraged.
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Interesting idea for the chat per pickup - I had imagined them as more private, but maybe it is more interesting to have it as a shared chat. It makes it more like facebook sharing groups as you said, which could be good or bad. They always seemed really hectic to me, and a bit like a popularity contest. There was also the problem of the “sort by $” algorithm for deciding which order to show them in, and that old ones would not seem to be removed, so lots of “DM’d you” type messages long after the item has gone… (which might be resolvable by making the UI more clear/specific about that)… which I guess leads another point if people are more inclined to DM the author than write in the messages.
It’s definitely simpler though, and I really like that aspect…
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… also, it’ll probably take me ages to complete it, I’m paused for now as I will be cycling soon …
I guess there would be no filtering at its first iteraction and offers would be sorted by date, which still leaves the problem of old offers being visible. Later we could also have some sort of expiration date as mentioned by Janina or just a simple button for the person offering to disable/archive the offer. Depends on how much you want to implement at once…
DM would still be possible, but having a chat per item would still allow for some interesting use cases in smaller groups where trust is higher and communication in general is more transparent.
I was also wondering, if we want to have the possibility of sharing/offering things publicly in the future and also from a user to a group to which they do not belong to, would this affect much the work that is put on the backend at this stage?
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Yup, basically I am happy to follow your lead on how this should work. You are like “feature owner” as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve just added the chat to the UI, it’s only with mock data for now, doesn’t work, but you can see it at https://deploy-preview-1799--karrot.netlify.com/#/group/13/offers/234 - and should work for mobile display now too.
Maybe that would be sufficient for viewing the offers for initial version?
I’ll work a bit more on the form for creating offers, as I wanted to add support for uploading multiple images, which we didn’t do before…
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I think I’ll start working on the backend now with the following concept:
- any member of a group can create an offer within that group
- offers will be only offered within the group
- they have a single conversation attached, to which anyone can participate should they wish
- the list will be ordered by creation date
- each offer will have name, description, and one or more photos
- the first photo is the “cover” photo
things I won’t work on initially, but will need some solution/implementation soonish:
- no ability to remove offers once created
- no expiry for items
- no history entries created
Would welcome any feedback about this basic model of offers, @bruno has basically come up with that model, maybe @Disa / @tiltec / @djahnie or any others have some opinions too 
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Sounds good!
What about having “accepted” and “disabled” statuses for offers that the creator can set?
Did you think about notifications already? Should users be made aware of new offers? Can they be marked as seen?
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Cool! I guess the next thing to make it a great working prototype would be the disabled/archive status that creators of offers can set.
Will it be possible at this first stage to edit the offer? Then people will find a way to mark it as disabled if it’s not available
So, this is sort-of working now - the backend was deployed to dev.karrot.world yesterday, and the frontend, is still very much work in progress, but you can use quite a few of the features via the netlify preview.
I don’t like the accept/archive buttons at the moment, but will leave them that until a better idea arrives
So bluuuuuuuuuuuuue
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Looking good! Maybe we could deploy it to the Playground group for a few days and ask people from different groups to try it out and do some testing? It’s much less of a barrier for the average user than logging into dev.
At some point we could even add location to offers.
The frontend is not merged yet (so not available on https://dev.karrot.world/), thats the first step, and it’s close!
I also need to add the feature flag option to allow it to be used only for some groups.
After that I agree!
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Maybe need to tweak default offer email settings, I think most existing playground group members might not be interested in receiving emails when somebody creates a new offer 
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Now the backend has the feature flag, the netlify preview didn’t allow sharing. So, I enabled the offers feature flag for all the dev.karrot.world groups
It would be great, if you can enable “Offers” for group #29 (EfA - Essen für Alle) too.
Thanks a lot! Sylvia
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