Add 'helper' events

[rogerbarton]

This was an idea that was suggested to me for the amiv android app. The idea was initially to allow people to subscribe to push notifications if they are willing to help out at events.

My take on how to add a similar functionality would be to something like a 'is_helper_event' variable to the event object, which should hopefully be easy to do. This will then appear as a normal event but can be filtered. So then on the website/app the user can set whether helper events are shown or not, if they are interested.

Currently, we already have helper events for some larger events, e.g. sushi or ertstitag guide. A better to add this may be to add a category variable to the event object.

Thoughts?

[NotSpecial]

I'm not sure I quite understand. If a event is flagged as helper event, is this still the normal event? Or should each event (if needed) have separate helper event?

We floated the ideas of adding helpers to the AMIV API for a while, but ultimately removed it for the following reasons:

• Only a few events really need a large number of dedicated helpers
• Those helpers need to be managed, i.e. different jobs, shifts, etc., which requires an external tool (like a table in drive) anyways

Aside from that, we briefly discussed event categories at some point, i.e. being able to flag events with things like HoPo or, in this case, Event Help (or similar), maybe we should look into this again.

Regarding this issue, I think the following questions are important:

1. How relevant is this issue? (How many of such events do we expect, how many helpers are we talking about)
2. What functionality is needed? Really just flagging the event? Or do we need more, e.g. different kinds of helpers, tracking helpers alongside normal signups?

[rogerbarton]

To clarify first, a helper event would still be a normal event. It will also not be linked to another event, as we can have independent helper events, e.g. the erstitag guide event. On the current amiv website, we post larger helper events just as normal events, but it may be good to be able to categorise these, so people can in a way subscribe to helper events.

For most helper events this would be less than 10 signups, I assume, and probaly for around 5 events per semester. Most likely only used for larger events.

Just a boolean value to flag the event as a helper event would be enough, but it would probably be best (and most generalised) to have a category string, where we can set category="helper" for example. Alternatively have event tags, so a string array, ie multiple categories.

I guess this issue is more about whether we should categorise events or add tags to events. It is probably best to discuss the idea shortly in the IT Meeting.