Submission rights for speakers in subcontributions

[OmeGak]

Related SNOW ticket CHG34279. Discussion here: INC1010298.

Before implementing this we should try to understand what subcontributions are used for. Are they but contribution topics? Are they just nested contributions?

[jouvin]

I apologize for missing the duplicate when opening #3019. Based on what we see at LAL, subcontributions are used as an additional level in the agenda, with the contribution being in fact a sub-session. Properly handling this may require some non-trivial changes but I've the feeling that without changing anything to the current agenda structure model and to the current permission model, it should be possible to improve the life of Indico users relying on contributions by implementing what I suggested in #3019.

[ThiefMaster]

The problem with that is that it's not very clear that this would give submission rights to the parent contribution and all its other subcontributions too. Besides that I like the idea though. Worth discussing it for sure.

[jouvin]

It is certainly more a workaround than a real solution but it will really improve the Indico experience. I am involved with supporting a 3-day event taking place next week with around 80 presenters. The event organizer just finished entering the emails at the sub-contribution level (my fault, I thought it was what was giving the submission rights!) and now he has to restart at the contribution level!

I understand your point but I think a message in the sub-contribution dialog could make it clear.

[maarten-litmaath]

Hi all,
I support the request for ACLs per subcontribution. I suspect quite a few agenda organizers have been bitten by this inconsistency: speakers can be defined at the subcontribution level, while ACLs can only be defined at the contribution level. Furthermore, such ACLs then apply to all subcontributions, i.e. the speaker for one of them can "mess" with all of them.

[dguest]

For what it's worth this just "bit" me a few times. Thanks for looking into it!

[vlimant]

For what it's worth, it would be very practical to have this available

[kpachal]

Having a problem with this also - adding my vote for a fix :)

[fwyzard]

Dear Indico developers, please fix this: we need speaker in sub-contributions to be able to upload their own material.

[pferreir]

I think that the reason for sub-contributions to be considered second-class citizens in Indico right now is that we are not even sure they are useful in the first place. At least, I always have a hard time explaining to people the need for yet another level of nesting, some sort of talk inside a talk, let alone why you would need to have specific protection settings for them. Maybe having some feedback from all of you on the concrete use cases would help us figure out which way to go?

/ping @dguest @vlimant @kpachal @fwyzard

[fwyzard]

The way I use sub-contributions in a meeting is to have a round-table discussion, with a placeholder entry for each participant, where they can upload their material.

I prefer to use a contribution for a specific topic, and a single contribution with many sub-contributions when many groups can potentially report on a singular topic.

The current solution is to give everybody upload permissions for the contribution (and thus all sub-contributions). This kind of works, but it's confusing to people and more cumbersome to set up.

[ThiefMaster]

This sounds like you could create a "Round Table" session, and give each participant a regular contribution in there.

This is actually close to what we do for our weekly meeting (except that we don't put a session around it).

[fwyzard]

This sounds like something you could do with a more feature rich implementation of sub-contributions.

[dguest]

Hi @pferreir, I use subcontributions like other people have mentioned: we'll have one discussion on a particular subject and ask multiple people to contribute material.

I think removing subcontributions would also solve the problem. Without those I probably would have poked around until I discovered session blocks, and then would have created one session for each topic and created contributions within that.

But as long as we have subcontributions people will try to use them, and given that it's a bit of effort to check that permissions are set properly most people won't realize that the permissions don't work the same way there that they do elsewhere.

[rustemos]

Hello,

I would like to add my vote for making a speaker of a sub-contribution to be automatically given rights to upload material to that sub-contribution/contribution. This seems to me like a reasonable solution, consistent with how contributions are treated.

We have the same use case as @fwyzard above: a roundtable discussion with several different people reporting for one sub-contribution. Not being able to give a permission to upload for sub-contributions has created some confusion.

Thank you,
Rustem

[pferreir]

@rustem0 any particular reason why you would not want to use session blocks for that?

[rustemos]

@pferreir I guess similar to the above comment, we have just started with sub-contributions since this seemed like a logical approach that matched our need.

Session blocks would work too probably, although ours is a short monthly meeting where we go around a table to report on various activities and maybe call this a session would be an overstatement :-)

Thanks,
Rustem