Handling "no shows"

[brunogirin]

While we were running a workshop last night, a student who was not in the workshop came to me about the no shows policy at codebar. They were quite distressed at having being told by organisers from another chapter that they were banned from codebar due to "no show". I had a review of their history and indeed they have a few no shows where I would consider an attendence reminder (which had been done) but not a ban.

Suggestions for overhauling the no shows policy:

Chapter management

We should remind chapter organisers that:

• The way no shows is handled is completely at their discretion and they should veer on the side of leniency.
• The first step is an attendence reminder, do that first and only ban someone when they are really abusing the system.
• A ban is temporary.

Technical improvements

The way the "no shows" marker works today is not that useful: see planner issue 1417.

The onus is on the attendees: if the chapter organisers don't properly complete the attendence form at the end of a workshop, attendees automatically have a "no show" mark against their record, even if they were there. As codebar grows, it would be useful to structure that process a bit more. We could make the workshop reports explicit in the system with changes like:

• Replace the current tick boxes against the names with an explicit new page where the organisers can create a workshop report (default to present for maximum efficiency)
• Once the report is sent back, update the attendence records

As a side effect, this process would also deal with the "no show for future workshops" highlighted in 1417 above.

In addition to this, it appears that there is no way to cancel your RSVP if you are on the waiting list. We should enable that.

Finally, it would be good to have a way to handle attendees who didn't cancel their RSVP in time but notified us through other channels (Slack, email) that they couldn't attend due to a last minute issue. Technically they are a "no show" but they took steps to notify us. Today, the West London chapter marks them as "present" to avoid a "no show" mark against them.

[brunogirin]

I forgot to say in the above: we also see that a lot of "no shows" are new members who have never been to a workhsop and don't really know how it works. How can we handle new members better?

[biggianteye]

I saw a PR recently that changed the wording from Ban to Suspend. I can't recall if it also changed the functionality to make it a temporary suspension.

[brunogirin]

@biggianteye I think it was always a temporary suspension but I am not 100% sure.

While I'm here, I just thought of something else to add to the mix: a number of no shows we have are because someone move from the waiting list to the main list very late (typically on the morning of the workshop) and cannot attend at such short notice.

[KimberleyCook]

The PR update was simply to amend the word, feedback was that the word was too harsh and should be suspend instead of ban.

Great topic for discussion tomorrow.

[KimberleyCook]

• Remind organisers that "no show" is at their discretion
• Remind organisers that checking in people is required
• Bit more information added to the admin area - check ratio rather than an exact number - say no showed 5 times but from 100 shows.
• Not auto RSVP waitlist people, send an email giving attendee the option to attend, give 12 hour to say yes otherwise no.

[despo]

Related pull request codebar/planner#1455

This is not touching any of the points mentioned above (yet), but it should give the organisers a better idea about what's going on as we've also experienced attendance warnings or notes being missed.

It also amends the no-show marker on the workshop page to show up if > 3 missed workshop in the last 6 months + 2 attendance warning emails.

It's all up for discussion so please feel free to comment on the PR.