When does a meeting become a "past meeting"?

Thanks to everyone who posted their input here. I had decided to take a short pause on further posts to this thread to allow you all to add your voices.

My conclusion is that there is not much agreement on this... Generally speaking, my thinking after reading this is to focus on 3 areas:

1. When the agenda gets locked for edits... including showing the role sign-up buttons, confirmation buttons, etc. This is something that has been brought up a number of times in the past. My thinking is that I should probably just provide a new option to allow setting a number of hours prior to a meeting start time to lock an agenda, with the default being zero hours. I do not think members should be editing an agenda after the meeting start at all. After that point, it should be up to the VPE or Toastmaster (?) to make those changes.

2. When the agenda can be marked as reconciled. I am still inclined to make this the end time of the meeting. If you want to reconcile the agenda during the meeting, that is fine, you just would not be able to mark the agenda as reconciled until the end of the meeting. Using the end time of the meeting does not prevent you from marking the agenda as reconciled the next day, it just seems to me like the natural time to be able to mark it would be the end of the meeting.

3. Everything else, basically role reports, sign-up sheets, and attendance. From my perspective, it should be either the meeting end time or the meeting date (past is prior day). If you are tracking actual attendance at a meeting that has completed, it seems to me you would want to be able to do that right after the meeting finishes... not the next day.

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.