MCF processing request

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

It's that wonderful time of year again where we need to cause several
hundred competitors to return pieces of paper to their teachers. To
ensure that we can distribute pictures of the competition safely, every
competitor (or their guardian) has to grant permission for pictures of
them to be distributed. This leads to the media consent form (MCF)
dance. Emails on these topics are open to review [0,1].

In the spirit of delegating things, I would desperately like the
processing of these forms to be handled by someone else. I've drafted a
procedure for how MCF handling occurs [2], and would quite like to put a
willing volunteer (or alternately, team of volunteers who can work
closely) on the end of mediac...@studentrobotics.org to handle these
queries.

This is a fairly important part of Student Robotics, and we make it
important for the competitors too because they can't get a ticket to the
competition without having returned such a form, and having had it
processed. If you're able to spare some time for handling some media
consent forms, please let me know by reply email.

[0] https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/2691/
[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/gerrit/#/c/2692/
[2] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/MCF_Handling
[3] https://www.studentrobotics.org/userman

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hi Jeremy,

SR Southampton can help out with the MCF forms!

It'll be a group of us helping out, so we'll need to set up some sort locking queue system to make sure that all forms are processed without collisions. How long a delay do we want between them sending the email and us processing them? (i.e. do they expect to be getting the tickets as soon as they submit them or is there a time we tell them they we'll get the forms done by?)

Thanks,

Andy Barrett-Sprot

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[Jeremy Morse]

Hi Andy,

On 23/03/16 15:00, Andrew Barrett-Sprot wrote:
> SR Southampton can help out with the MCF forms!

Excellent!,

> It'll be a group of us helping out, so we'll need to set up some sort
> locking queue system to make sure that all forms are processed without
> collisions.

Yar -- I'm open to suggestions there: the best system is the one that
works best for you [0]. Trac tickets are a perfectly acceptable
mechanism for example, so long as there's only one person /creating/ the
tickets, or some other de-duplication technology is applied.

One other person has volunteered to lend a hand, it's not /completely/
necessary to make this work for people outside of Southampton though.
Getting the task done is the objective.

> How long a delay do we want between them sending the email
> and us processing them? (i.e. do they expect to be getting the tickets
> as soon as they submit them or is there a time we tell them they we'll
> get the forms done by?)

No real rule of thumb here, they shouldn't expect an immediate response
though. Many days delay are acceptable right now; towards the
competition less lead time will be desirable, seeing how there's less
time for them to print tickets etc.

Peter is working on a technological solution to processing MCFs [1].
None have actually come into mediaconsent@ yet, so there's no immediate
pressure.

Many thanks for volunteering!

[0] Ideally they'd come in as RT tickets, but hey, we're not there yet.
[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/ticket/3112

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Sitrep: two MCFs have come in so far, and Peter has kindly set up
infrastructure for handling forms. I'll likely test the whole process
tomorrow, then we'll start shipping.

inre synchronisation, I'm likely going to set up a dummy user account
and fetchmail/procmail on cron that creates one trac ticket per email:
tasks can then be distributed via taking ownership on trac. If someone
has a better idea, I'd love to know.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

So I'm behind on this, but Peters script works magnificently.

Shortly after starting some scripting, I realized that actually this
situation is _perfectly_ suited to requesttracker, the stuff I tried to
ship before the competition this year. So I'm going to put a little time
into configuring it the way I imagined, which hopefully will work.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 05/04/16 22:23, Jeremy Morse wrote:
> Shortly after starting some scripting, I realized that actually this
> situation is _perfectly_ suited to requesttracker, the stuff I tried to
> ship before the competition this year. So I'm going to put a little time
> into configuring it the way I imagined, which hopefully will work.

Righty: rt now listens on rt@, and will later listen on mediaconsent@.
Access is at srobo.org/rt for which you need a mentor account. I'll
mangle some permissions stuff later because there's sensitive data.

I've disabled all the stuff people seemed to find distasteful last time,
specifically automatically sending people emails at various points.

Basic workflow looks like this for someone working on MCFs:
* Someone emails mediaconsent@, for which a ticket is created
* RT will forward that email on to you (specifically, if you are a
"queue CC").
* You 'take' the ticket in RT, after which you know you're definitely
working on it
* Follow this [0] process for handling the actual consent forms.
* Once done, 'reply' to the person who originally mailed saying you've
handled their submission, and mark the ticket as 'resolved'.

Inevitably someone will submit an "interesting" MCF or there'll be an
issue. You can write comments into the ticket that will only be seen by
people in SR where we can discuss what needs to be done. When this
happens, you should put the usernames of the people (i.e. me) who need
to see the comment in the 'CC' field to ensure they get an email about it.

~

This is probably fairly daunting to suddenly step into suddenly, so I'm
going to get in contact with people who've volunteered to handle MCFs
and go through some worked examples with them.

Hopefully this results in faster servicing and more load-spreading,
which would be great.

[0] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/MCF_Handling

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Yo,

MCF handling instructions update [0] and systems enabled, thanks to
people who've volunteered to work on this. More volunteers are most welcome!

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Jeremy wrote:
> MCF handling instructions update [0] and systems enabled, thanks to
> people who've volunteered to work on this. More volunteers are most welcome!

Not sure if this is intentional, but there doesn't appear to be a link
anywhere to where Request-Tracker is actually hosted.

Otherwise looks good.

Thanks,
Peter

> [0] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/MCF_Handling