Beta calendar event submission

I've scoured all the beta calendar threads and couldn't find any discussion of what seems to be an obvious question. If it's been discussed and I missed it, then my apologies in advance.

With LUWS, any member could submit a request for a calendar event, and then an administrator would approve or reject that request. With the beta calendar, it appears that this option no longer exists.

Yes, you can add as many editors of as many calendars as you wish, but if a member wants to schedule an event for any calendar they don't have edit permissions for, they're out of luck. They can contact an editor of the calendar in question, and ask them to add an event, but even that can be tricky -- as near as I can tell, there's no way for a non-approver to know who the editors are.

And yet the developers went to the trouble of allowing regular members to create a calendar, which then goes through an approval process before it becomes active. That seems like a really uncommon use case, whereas a member wanting to submit an event seems to be much more common.

Off hand, the only case I can think of where a "just a member" would submit an event is when they wanted to schedule the use the building for a wedding or a similar family event. However, in quite a few of those cases, it was done by emailing the coordinator with the request.

In all other cases it was a leader of an organization which perhaps should have their own calendar.

In other words, I don't see the issue. What events have you seen where members placed events on the calendar?

RussellHltn wrote:In other words, I don't see the issue. What events have you seen where members placed events on the calendar?

Here are some examples that have happened in our stake and wards:

• A ward schedules a fireside but wants to invite other wards in the stake to the event. So they submit an event to the stake event calendar.
• A scout schedules an Eagle project activity that could involve many members of the ward
• A Provident Living specialist schedules an activity and submits all the details in the calendar request.
• And of course, as you mentioned, plenty of wedding receptions, family reunions, and other individual family usages.

Sure, in all of these cases someone could have sent an email with the information. But the first point is that this useful function has been removed. And the larger point is that there is now no way to know who is an editor for a particular calendar under the new beta calendar.

Finally, I may be getting ahead of myself a bit here, but reservations for resource calendars are very often done now via submissions. We've been told that resource calendars are going to be implemented in the next beta release. I don't know how the approval process will work for resource calendars. But I would think that there would be far fewer resource approvers than event approvers, and that seems like it will be a big problem. That's not an issue of "regular members" submitting requests, but auxiliary leaders and others who will have authority to edit event calendars, but not building calendars. We'll have to see.

RussellHltn wrote:In other words, I don't see the issue. What events have you seen where members placed events on the calendar?

I would have to agree with Alan. We have been working to train our members on how to use the stake and resource calendars and that if the want to add an event to the calendar, they do it themselves. Each building has its own resource calendar that the building scheduler has been set up to receive all the notifications for their building. If the building is available for use, according to the resource calendar, they can schedule it but it still needs to be approved. The approval of the requested event allows the event to be shown on the resource calendar.

I would hate to see the approval functionality discontinued, even if every organization has their own calendar. It seems this is moving away from a more self-serviceable model. We have resource calendars for all our buildings, LCD projectors, tables and chairs, etc. We have even started using a resource calendar to allow members to report items needing attention by the FM group. Approval for all of these in our current model is important and necessary.

Just because someone can place an event on a calendar doesn't/shouldn't mean it is approved. And if they can't submit their own events except by email or some other way, that seems like a lot more work for the Editor of the calendar or resource.

One of the suggestions I posted earlier (and others have as well) is the ability to calendar and schedule the resource at the same time, instead of having to double entry an event. It would be nice to have them both (calendaring and resourcing) at the same time as they go hand in hand many times.

MRK wrote:Just because someone can place an event on a calendar doesn't/shouldn't mean it is approved. And if they can't submit their own events except by email or some other way, that seems like a lot more work for the Editor of the calendar or resource.

I agree on both counts. Just because a because a committee can schedule an event, doesn't mean it's gone though the approvals necessary for clearance to have the event. Under the current system, if the calendar approver is a member of the bishopric, then the odds of a unapproved event showing up to the membership is low.

Another upside to the current calendar submission process is that it easy for the approver. The member dresses it up the way they want, the approver looks it over and does any necessary editing and clicks "approve".

But moving forward to the new system, what happens if an event is submitted to the wrong calendar? In the case of the Eagle scout event, it might get submitted to the scouting calendar when it should go on the ward calendar where it will reach a larger audience. I can see where "which calender a event should be placed on" can result in some discussion. I'm not sure as the "end-members" can be expected to know what calendar it should go on.

In having worked with the current LUWS calendar extensively for the past 5 years I haven't seen very many instances where a "regular member" would submit an event for the calendar.

However, the current LUWS calendar does support the function and I agree with Alan that I'd hate to see it disappear completely.

Due to the complexity of the new beta calendar I can see the need to place an event onto the correct calendar. Hopefully, the editors would be wise enough to make the correct choice.

In providing this feature it might be helpful to submit the event to one key individual such as a ward administrator who can then review the submission and pass it along to the correct editor to have it scheduled or else schedule it themselves.

this issue LUC-27 appears to have been resolved, to be included in a future release.

kd7mha wrote:this issue LUC-27 appears to have been resolved, to be included in a future release.

I'm not so sure I trust the "Fixed" status on that Jira. It was done last year and still has not shown up. I find it hard to believe that it was fixed so long ago but has not been incorporated in a release.

I would also contrast that with LUC-21, which seems to be a similar feature, and was marked "Will not fix" just this week along with a note that it is no longer on the backlog -- that seems to say that it was decided not to add this feature.

But all this is speculation. It would be nice if someone actually working on the project could chime in....