TOPIC:

Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to supporting our Club Websites. One of the best technology features in Toastmasters!
I agree with both #2 and #3. Regarding #1 Perhaps more than just the VPE and Toastmaster, perhaps also President and Secretary? I know our Club has a lot of work to do with getting members to even signup for meeting roles let alone reconciling meetings.

Thanks again,
Herman Koester, DTM

Ok, I have updated the date logic for displaying the Reconciled checkbox so that it is un-hidden immediately after the end time of the meeting. This logic does depend on the timezone that you set for your club, since the server always runs on GMT time, so I have to convert to same timezones for date/time comparisons (I get the current time from the FTH server). Therefore, this is yet another reason for you to make sure your timezone is set correctly for your club.

I will be updating some of the other features mentioned in this topic shortly.

If any of you wish to test this logic, just create a dummy agenda and fiddle with the meeting date and meeting start time and save after each change. (Keep in mind that you will need to add the meeting duration onto the start time to get the end time, since that is what is actually being examined.) One thing you will notice however, is that the date comparison logic is done on the server, not in JavaScript, so if you change the time to make the meeting be "future" from what is current "past", the reconcile pop-up still shows until after you have saved at least once. (An immediate date/time change is not examined by the Javascript code.) Perhaps in the future I can move the date logic to JavaScript, but it is just simpler to do it on the server for now so I do not have to deal with all the timezone stuff in JavaScript.

Re: Locking the agenda for changes. Currently, the way this works is the following:

1. The website admin and "Agenda Creators" (VPE and anyone else marked as such in the Access Settings tab.) have full edit rights to *any* agenda, past and future.

2. "Agenda Editors" (President and people assigned to meeting roles marked as agenda editors.) for a specific agenda and a member editing a role he/she is assigned to cannot edit *past agendas*. For this purpose, a "past agenda" is one that is dated yesterday or prior. ***No time consideration (meeting start or end time) is made for this currently.*** Once we are on the following day, the agenda is "locked" for changes by these people.

There have been requests in the past for allowing the agenda to be locked for changes at some number of hours prior to a meeting (or similar logic). I have always been on the fence about this, because of personal experience, and also having to move from date logic to time logic to implement this--there are probably as many clubs that would like the change as would hate it.

I could certainly put a new field in place to allow clubs to specify how many hours (?) prior to some point in time that the agenda should be locked for #2 above. If I did that, though, again the question becomes what point in time is the right point in time. If I made the time relative to the meeting end time, for example, and your club has 2 hour meetings, you could conceivably set the hypothetical new field to be 2 hours (prior) so that the agenda would be locked at the beginning of your meeting. (A bit convoluted, but doable.)

So, let me know your thoughts.

I'm happy with the decision you made on when to lock the agenda. Thank you for all of your due diligence on this and also for the great job you and the other staff members do on maintaining FTH for us. It's greatly appreciated.

herman.koester wrote:

I'm happy with the decision you made on when to lock the agenda. Thank you for all of your due diligence on this and also for the great job you and the other staff members do on maintaining FTH for us. It's greatly appreciated.

I have not made any decision yet on whether to change it. It is still set to lock the day after the agenda date. Nothing has (yet) changed on that.

I support the ability to lock the FTH meeting agenda at some point.

In an ideal situation at the meeting all Members would be viewing the agenda in real time. Until that is a reality, a cutoff is a viable solution.

I would prefer this feature to be a default that the VP Ed. or Administrator would set. And, I believe it would be much easier for members to set the LOCKOUT time using the START time as a reference. For example, if meeting start time is 7 PM and the LOCKOUT is set for 2 hours, this would mean members would not be able to sign-up for a role after 5 PM.

As personal experience: I belong to two Clubs. Start time is 7:00 PM. In each Members have been asked not to schedule a role after 5:30 PM. Yet, in each we have had the TM arrive and distribute the agenda, ask someone to fill a vacant role only to learn that a member scheduled that role after the TM printed the agenda. The LOCKOUT would eliminate this challenge.

jdoucet wrote:

I support the ability to lock the FTH meeting agenda at some point.

In an ideal situation at the meeting all Members would be viewing the agenda in real time. Until that is a reality, a cutoff is a viable solution.

I would prefer this feature to be a default that the VP Ed. or Administrator would set. And, I believe it would be much easier for members to set the LOCKOUT time using the START time as a reference. For example, if meeting start time is 7 PM and the LOCKOUT is set for 2 hours, this would mean members would not be able to sign-up for a role after 5 PM.

As personal experience: I belong to two Clubs. Start time is 7:00 PM. In each Members have been asked not to schedule a role after 5:30 PM. Yet, in each we have had the TM arrive and distribute the agenda, ask someone to fill a vacant role only to learn that a member scheduled that role after the TM printed the agenda. The LOCKOUT would eliminate this challenge.

Thanks! Keep in mind that we do have a "lockout" in place currently--however, currently it does not take effect until the day after the meeting date. What I am exploring is the possibility of changing that in a way that would allow for more flexibility by clubs that want it. Also, we certainly would not want clubs to discourage members from signing up for roles, even if it was at the last minute. What this would do is to allow clubs to make the website work in way that is consistent with the policy set by the club rather than clubs having to work around the way the website works. Also, it would not prevent people from taking roles at the last minute, but that would have to be more at the discretion of the VPE.

My concern with something like this is that it could become the cutoff time that the agenda is printed. What if the agenda is normally printed the night before a meeting (and that is set as the lockout time), but members do not commit to a role until 2 hrs before the meeting. Don't you then end up discouraging members from signing up for roles?

Or maybe the lockout *should* be set when the agenda is printed by the VPE or Toastmaster. We know when you print an agenda...

Despite how it may sound, I really don't want to over-complicate this. I just want to explore whether there may be a better approach to this than we are currently using.

Agreed. We do not want to discourage members from signing up for roles.

If there was such a feature available, the two Clubs I belong to would make use of it.

Thank you for all you do.

Should the cutoff be different for the agenda editors (e.g. Toastmaster) vs regular members? Maybe you would want the Toastmaster to be able to edit the agenda during the meeting but not regular members? (e.g. for clubs that might show & update the agenda via a projector during the meeting) Just thinking out loud here...

At my club the members print their own agendas a day or two before the meeting. The VPE asks members not to change roles on the agenda after a "cutoff time" 2 days before the meeting, so we all have the same agenda at the meeting (Late changes are announced by the Toastmaster). Members are asked not to print until after the "cutoff time". I would like to be able to lock the agenda to role changes at a fixed time, but still allow speakers to edit their speech details after that time.
Even better would be to allow members (optionally?) to edit their speech project and title after the agenda is reconciled. At the moment the VPE has to do that

One of my clubs is hybrid. We meet onsite monthly and via Zoom videoconferencing weekly. So we rarely print our agenda on paper. Even tonight the agenda changed within a couple of minutes of the meeting starting.

Perhaps it could be a button for the Toastmaster of the meeting to "lock" the agenda for member changes to force people to connect them directly for anything last minute.

As we often have to assign roles at the meeting, I too would love to have the ability to update the agenda with who actually performed the role. It would be nice to have it "unlocked" at least until Midnight of the meeting day, to allow time for updates. Alternatively, have it locked for member sign-in, and unlocked for the site admin.

Hi Steve,
I would like to have the time to edit the agenda dor at leas a couple of days after the meeting ends. Is a week too long?
Thanks,
Marilyn

I have been doing well with the current method of not locking until midnight because I can't get to update our noontime meeting at a business until the evening sometime. If it were locked for the regular members to not sign up for roles after the meeting is over but still let me work on it in the evening when I can post attendance easier (for those people present without a role) that would be all right. Thanks for all the "great stuff" you've been putting into this.
Steve Sigrest
TravTalk Toastmasters # 4418

I have been reading everyone's responses on this, and it seems like we should leave the current scheme in place as it applies to agenda editors (e.g. Toastmaster and other meeting roles that can edit the agenda).

It seems that the area that would benefit from a change is when we lock the agenda for changes from "normal members". Currently, this point in time is the same as for the agenda editors. It seems that should be changed and not lumped together with agenda editor roles.

If I split this out, we would have 3 categories:

1. Agenda Creators (VPE, Admin, and any officer role set as an Agenda Creator via Access Settings) - NEVER LOCKED
2. Agenda Editors (President + Any Meeting Roles marked as agenda editors) - LOCKED at MIDNIGHT
3. Any other members - LOCKED PRIOR TO MEETING START (???)

Thank you Steve! I say mark it as number 1

I don't know whether this complicates things or not, but if it's an easy fix...
What about having a "checkbox" that LOCKS the agenda for non-authorized editors?
This gives flexibility to each club's situation.

bumping this as I wlll be doing some work on this shortly