Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Despite a slightly improved UX, there are still many users who do not confirm their vote in the Budgets module.
Describe the solution you'd like
Users who haven't confirmed their votes should get automatic reminders regularly before the voting phase ends. For example:
- one 24 hours after they picked projects
- one 24 hours before the voting phase ends
- weekly reminders on top of that
If they pick projects less than 24 hours before the voting phase ends, they could get the reminder after 10 minutes of inactivity?
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Manual reminders
In addition or as an alternative to automatic reminders, it would be great for admins to have the possibility to send manual reminders whenever they want.
That could be done through the newsletter system if the available filters could target users who have pending votes in a Budgets module.
A simpler solution would be to add a button in the module that sends reminders (see screenshot).
- Disable vote confirmation
Finally, another alternative I suggest is to disable vote confirmation altogether. This is CONSUL's behaviour and I don't see any major inconvenient with it. That means that some unfinished votes might be counted but as long as it's made clear to the user, is that an issue? That could also be alleviated with a reminder 24 hours before voting ends ("Last chance to edit your ballot"). For admins who really want vote confirmation, it could be made a setting at the module level?
Additional context
Pending votes seem to be a universal problem on Decidim platforms used for PB. In some of our processes, we manually checked out pending votes in the database with the organisers approval. When doing PB in schools, we knew that pupils voted in class with help from teachers but we still had ~30% of pending votes.
Could this issue impact users private data?
No
Funded by
Awaiting funding
This proposal has been accepted and is under development
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18 comments
@virgile_deville I remember that OSP developed improvements to reduce the problem. But I couldn't find it anywhere in Decidim's repo nor your module Budgets_enhanced. Any comments on that?
Conversation with Antti Hukkanen
In our experience, it's around 5-10% and sometimes even up to 20% (!!!!) of users who do not confirm the vote.
I just wanted to chime in here that we will be likely implementing this feature during H1/2021. This is not a promise but just wanted to let know that this is something that has been discussed in Finland too and we are putting time into developing a customized version of the budgeting component during the first half of this year.
That's great, do you have any public place where these plans are shared? (In English or even in Finnish)
We have ambitions to improve the Budgets component as well, as you can see on the various suggestions I've been posting her in the past few weeks. It would be interesting to sync.
If you don't have a public roadmap yet, we could have a joint meeting between Helsinki and our client to discuss it?
> do you have any public place where these plans are shared?
Unfortunately not.
> we could have a joint meeting between Helsinki and our client to discuss it?
We have pretty tight schedule for this, so I'd avoid extending the scope at this point. We'll see what we can sync back to core and what we need to develop externally (some features are pretty specific to the use case and not in line how the core budgets module is designed to work). But anyways, syncing back to core would have to be an afterthought after we finish with the customizations.
Here are few of the planned features if you are interested:
Let's go impulse shopping for budgeting projects (this is the biggest one)
Display budgeting projects in a modal window instead of their own page
Hello @ahu
How did these improvements go ? Did you ended up building some of them into modules ?
Curious to get an update. Thanks in advance
@virgile_deville We have been implementing a customized voting process module for Helsinki which you can find here:
https://github.com/mainio/decidim-module-budgeting_pipeline
The plan changed a bit from the "impulse shopping" idea, although it is pretty close to what is described in that proposal. The difference is that in the "browsing mode" you cannot add anything to your vote, you can only browse the projects. When you enter the "voting mode", you will actually select the projects to your vote(s). The modal display of projects was implemented for the "voting mode".
It's still not 100% finished but most of the functionality is there already. It is still being improved based on user testing feedback. There are also some very Helsinki-specific features there which needs to be generalized in order to be applicable to other instances too.
It's not very well documented (yet) and will require some changes in the Decidim layout code to work due to the way the Helsinki layout is structured. Some elements will be missing by default with the default Decidim layout if you install this module. Once we finish with all the change requests, we will generalize it a bit.
The reminder feature has not yet been implemented. It is still in the roadmap, so we will implement this and also create a PR to the core (regarding the reminder functionality) once we finish with the development. This should happen next month.
This would be awesome!
> Disable vote confirmation
I'd said that this really depends in the process normative; for instance in Barcelona we're planning to have this rule for voting: "You can vote in your district and also in other district of your choosing"; for this we're planning to use this "vote confirmation" thing, for having a better hand holding of the process.
Conversation with Armand
I've done something similar with sidekiq-scheduled, every 24hr at the same time of the day, we send a reminder to users which have a pending order. We don't send a reminder for orders which are too old or too young to avoid spamming.
I will be glad to provide an implementation based on a rake task to remain compatible with Heroku and Sidekiq.
That's really interesting, is it something that was active for New York's platform during the voting phase of their Youth PB?
Hi Pierre, I don't think so!
Conversation with Virgile Deville
Product update @pierre @elogabadou
Until july there won't be any accepted PR to budget module as there are many enhancements going on for Barcelona right. This confirmation thing might be one them.
Let's wait and see what happens with the enhancement streak to see if we go forward with this. https://github.com/AjuntamentdeBarcelona/decidim-barcelona/projects/2
Great! And nice to see some form of public roadmap! I would really sync with @ahu since they are also developing many improvements this semester. They seem to build new modules first but it would be good to avoid developing the same thing twice.
@pierre I think the Helsinki use case is pretty specific to the Helsinki, at least for now (as it's designed and implemented based on their needs). The front-end logic is a bit different how the core budgeting module has been planned to function for participants. So, I'm not yet sure how much of that could be incorporated to the core. It changes quite a lot the logic on how the budgeting module works and how it looks like which is why I don't think it fits to the core as-is.
The idea behind that is that there's a "pipeline" that guides the user through the voting and shows what they need to complete it. The problem we (or they) are trying to tackle with this is to get less people who will leave their votes open, to get the user successfully through the whole process. It's a bit more towards an online shopping experience where you fill out your shopping cart and finally confirm your order.
I'd recommend that once the Barcelona improvements are merged to the core (there seems to be a PR already), someone would review what we have done with Helsinki. There might be some interesting ideas that could be considered. In case there's a need to discuss about those, we can join the discussions, either me or someone from the Helsinki side.
@carol it looks like this would be a welcomed feature, do you think you could change it's status to accepted ?
Conversation with Antti Hukkanen
Update: we have started the development of this feature and we will first implement it for our two clients. Once we finish with that, we will create a PR to the core.
Hey @ahu do you have visibility on when you'll be sending the PR ? Can you confirm it'll be done by the end of the year ?
We have it almost ready for the client already. I would think we can merge it to the core during the end of the year, it just depends on the workload.
We can finance the work to merge it on the core. I'm sending you an email.
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