More on Conditional Activities

Definition and Applicability

You create a conditional activity by setting Self-Signups to Matches Role. A conditional activity will be included on a person's self-signup page only if the person's registration info contains a matching role:

1. A role of xxx matches any activity whose Base Name is xxx.
2. A role of the form ^xxx matches any activity whose Base Name starts with xxx.
3. A role of the form xxx^yyy matches any activity whose Base Name is xxx and whose Location starts with yyy.
4. A role of the form xxx^yyy$ matches any activity whose Base Name is xxx and whose Location is yyy.

In general, you should consider using conditional activities only if your group manages people in terms of roles in the real world. Otherwise in practice, you will not be able to maintain accurate Roles data inside PRESTO.

A Fancy Example, and a Simplified Version

Suppose you are signing up ushers for a performance series and have 2 kinds of ushers: Ushers and Senior Ushers. Suppose as well that Senior Ushers can signup for both jobs, but Ushers should not signup as Senior Ushers. Thus you want the self-signup page of ushers to not include any Senior Usher schedule items.

To accomplish this, you could:

• Create conditional activities named Usher and Usher (Senior).
• In your people data base, set the Roles field of each usher to Usher.
• In your people data base, set the Roles field of each senior usher to ^Usher. (In other words, this will match both activities because they both start with "usher").

In this basic case, you could achieve the same effect by setting up Usher as an unconditional activity — since everyone can signup for it. That is, you could:

• Create a regular activity named Usher and a conditional activity named Senior Usher.
• In your people data base, include no conditional activities in the Roles fields of plain ushers.
• In your people data base, include Senior Usher in the Roles field of each senior usher.

More on Category Requests

You use the Category Request signup style when you want people to request a job category and then have an admin assign them to a specific job in that category.

Job Category -> Specific Job Workflow

After someone signs up for a job category, you use the admin-signup page to *move* her to a specific job. When you are satisfied with (some section of) the schedule, you approve all these Ready requests.

Note that, prior to approval, a signup is shown at the job category in a person's Your Signups list and when a List All Signups is done. It is only after you have *approved* the request that the specific job is shown in these places. In other words, it is easy to keep tentative schedule assignments private until you are ready to share them.

Creating a Category and the Specific Jobs in a Category

When you do a Create Activity with the Category Request signup style, normally you leave its Location blank. Conversely when you create a specific-job activity, you give it the same Base Name and use Location to identify which job it is.

Note that there is special support for doing this. Setting a category activity's Location field to a comma-separated list will cause Create Activity to create a location-suffixed activity for each location in the list. Additionally each such specific job will have its Self-Signups property set to Not Allowed, and its Signup Style property set to Immediate.

For example:

• Imagine an election with multiple precincts. You need election officials to request positions, rather than just signup, because you need to decide where the officials are needed.
• Therefore you do a Create Activity with Base Name set to Election Official and Location set to Precinct 1, Precinct 2 — thereby creating 3 activities: Election Official and Election Official, Precinct 1 and Election Official, Precinct 2.
• When you put the Election Official activity into your schedule, it will appear on both the admin-signup and self-signup pages. When you put Election Official, Precinct 1 and Election Official, Precinct 2 into your schedule, they will only appear on the admin-signup page.

  Note that you can create all 3 items at once using Do Setup Action->Add Activity Grids.

Note that you can create more involved shift schedules "manually". For instance, you can expose specific schedule items to senior people via conditional activities.

Spot/Signup Counts and Sub-Categories

The number of signups for a Category Request schedule item is the sum of the signup requests and approved signups anywhere within the category. On the other hand, the # of Spots for such an item is normally the sum of its specific-item spots. But if a category allows unlimited signups or has no specific-item slots, the entered value remains its # of Spots setting.

You can create sub-category request schedule items in a category (e.g. Election Official, North and Election Official, South). The specific items of a sub-category are those whose Locations start with the sub-category's Location. That is, if a sub-category's location is ABC, its specific items are those whose locations start with ABC. Sub-category counts work like category counts. For example, suppose Election Official, North&South Precinct 1&2 are your four specific items, and each has 2 spots with 1 filled. Also suppose there are 2 pending requests at Election Official, North. Then:

• Election Official would be 6 of 8.
• Election Official, North would be 4 of 4.
• Election Official, South would be 2 of 4.
• Election Official, North Precinct 1 would be of 1 of 2; and so on.

More on Judged Contests

A judged contest is one in which an entrant's result is determined by evaluation. (Note that the Judged Contest feature can be applied to situations other than contests. For example, it could be used to tabulate employee-performance evaluations).

Setting Up and Using a Judged Contest

To create¹ a judged contest (say an essay-writing contest):

• Create an event in the usual way and then rename the default schedule from Volunteer Signup to Author Signup. (This is done via Make Signup Schedule->Do Setup Action->Update Props).
• Create a signup form named Essay Entry Form. Put any fields² you want in it, but include at least one field of type Computed³. For this contest, an entrant is scored on originality and composition, so include two Computed fields: Originality and Composition.
• Create an activity named Essay Contest, set its type to Contest (judged), set its form to Essay Entry Form, and create a schedule item for this activity in the usual way.
• If desired, customize the contest as described below.

A person, say Tom Jefferson, would enter the contest by clicking on the event's Author Signup link on Self-Signup Home, and then signing up for the Essay Contest activity. Judges would later score Tom Jefferson's entry by clicking on the event's Judge Essay Contest link, and then signing up for the Tom Jefferson, Essay Contest activity⁴.

Notes:

1. When you create your own contest, you can choose whatever names you want for the elements you create. And except for the names shown in green, you can edit the names of the elements PRESTO creates for you.
2. An example of another field might be: Entrant's Age. (You might also want to setup an anonymous entry name, as described in the next section).
3. The value of a Computed field is the average of the scores that judges entered into their scorecards for that field.
4. This kind of activity is called a Scorecard. A Scorecard and its schedule item are automatically created when an entrant signs up, and automatically deleted if an entrant withdraws. You cannot directly create or delete them.

Customizing a Contest

By default, the Scorecard activity for scoring a contest entry is named person's name, contest's name (as in Tom Jefferson, Essay Contest). If you want judging to be anonymous, include a required field in Essay Contest Form whose name² starts with E:. For example, suppose that Tom Jefferson typed "Declaration of Independence" into the E:Essay Title field, then the scorecard for his entry would be named Declaration of Independence, Essay Contest.

When you created the Essay Contest activity, PRESTO automatically created 4 elements for you. These elements influence what judges see. Thus before a contest is judged, you should look over these 4 elements and make any updates needed to fit your situation.

These elements are:

• A schedule named Judge Essay Contest.
• A signup form named Essay Contest Scorecard, which is the form displayed when a judge clicks on a Score this Entry button. PRESTO creates it by copying¹ each Computed field in Essay Entry Form, except that it sets each such field to Required and Self-Signup Can Enter It, and prepends J: to its name². You may now modify these fields or add others if desired. For example, if you want a blank J: field to default to 0 rather than trigger an error message, make it Optional.
• An activity named *** SCORING RULES ***, Essay Contest. You should put in its description any scoring guidelines you want to provide judges.
• The schedule item in Judge Essay Contest for *** SCORING RULES ***, Essay Contest. Each scorecard's # of Spots and Target Date will be set from this element. In this context, these two fields mean the maximum number of times the entry should be judged³ and the deadline for scoring the entry.

Notes:

1. If you later want to rename or add Computed fields to Essay Entry Form, you must make the matching changes to Essay Contest Scorecard yourself.
2. When a contest form is displayed by a non-administrator, the labels for any E: and J: fields will not include these prefix characters.
3. If you want a judge to score only certain entries, set the *** SCORING RULES *** activity's Self-Signups field to Matches Role and put the entry names of each entry she should judge into the Roles field of her registration form.

Viewing the Results of a Contest

To view an entrant's scores so far, click on the entrant's Essay Contest signup on the Admin-Signup page. You can also create and view contest reports. Note that people with Observer or Agent privilege can also view contest scores and any contest reports you create.

To create a contest report (say Essay Results Summary):

• Click on Make/Output Report->Do Setup Actions->CREATE REPORT and enter Essay Results Summary.
• Use Add Column to give the report at least 2 columns: Contestant and Score.
• Set the value of the Contestant column to Person's->Name.
• Assuming Originality counts for 60% and Composition 40% of each entrant's score, set the value of the Score column to: (!s.originality! * .6) + (!s.composition! * .4)
• Make the Contestant column Unsorted and the Score column Descending.

To generate this report:

• Go to the Output Report or Make/Output Report page.
• Select Essay Results Summary from the dropdown menu in its title line.
• Temporarily change the report's layout and/or its scope as desired.
• If the report's scope is context dependent (e.g. Current Event), setup the desired context (e.g. make the event containing the contest the current event).
• Click on an Output Report button.

If you had multiple contests with the same scoring columns and wanted to view results of just one of them, the Current Event scope would not suffice. You would have to:

• Select Search Results... from the Report Scope dropdown menu.
• Set the Search form's Activity Field to Essay Contest and click on Use Results.