Handling attendees in Summit

[Chris Johnston]

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Greeting,

I filed a bug against summit "Stop requiring someone to be 'attending'
in LP" [1]. Currently, in order to use the functionalities of Summit,
you have to be 'attending' the event. The only way to do this is in
Launchpad [2]. This functionality works 'ok' for UDS, but it is
horrible for any other event which does not rely heavily on Launchpad
as Ubuntu does. There are a few things that I want to do with this, to
make it easier for the user in all situations. Currently, even with
UDS, people have a hard time understanding that they have to register
in Launchpad to get the Summit features.

The first thing that I would like to do is allow a user to propose a
meeting without being marked as attending the event. For other events
which use Summit, a person may not attend if their meeting isn't
accepted, therefore it doesn't really make sense for them to mark
themselves as attending, propose a meeting, and then not actually
attend the event.

I think this could be accomplished a couple of different ways, I'm
just not sure which is the best. The first way I see it is that we
could remove the requirement to be an attendee to propose a meeting.
If we do this though, the way Summit currently stands, we would need
to later relink their attendee status to the meeting in order for them
to show up as 'attending the meeting.' The other way I see it is that
we could create an attendee record for the user when they save the
propose a meeting form if they aren't already an attendee. This option
though takes us back to something I stated earlier in that the use may
end up not attending but they are showing as attending. Currently this
doesn't really matter as this data in Summit isn't used for anything,
but it would make sense that in the future the data may be used for
statistics and this would just be generating possibly false data.

The second thing I would like to change is to remove the requirement
for an attendee to register in Launchpad as attending the event. They
would still need an Ubuntu SSO account (and Launchpad account) in
order to login to Summit, but no longer need to register as attending
the event in Launchpad. I see a few possible options with this:

Completely remove the concept of attendee inside of Summit. I'm not
sure on if this would be good or not. Doing this would reduce our
ability of providing any sort of statistics in the future.

Continue to allow a user to register in Launchpad as attending, but
also allow them to register in Summit as attending. The issue I see
with this is, which would be authoritative? It would also make sense
that we allow a user to edit their registration afterwards, but that
isn't really a big deal.

Stop with importing attendees from Launchpad and use only registration
in Summit. I like this option except that people would say 'but I
registered in Launchpad. If we were to do this, the best thing to do
would be remove the attendee code from Launchpad, and I'm not sure
that this is an option.

I'm sure there are other options that are possible, but I think that
these are the main ones. What other thoughts and feedback is there on
how to implement these two items?


[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/summit/+bug/1147863
[2] https://launchpad.net/sprints/uds-1303

Thanks,

cJ

- -- 
Respectfully,

Chris Johnston
chrisjohnston at ubuntu.com
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