Assigning people

Once your shiftsA block of time that needs to be staffed, with a label, an optional location, and a start and end. A shift belongs to one group and holds one or more positions. Shifts are capped at 24 hours and must fall within a week either side of the event dates, which leaves room for setup and teardown. have positionsA role needed on a shift, such as First Aider or Door. A position carries how many people it needs, which ticket tags make someone eligible, and the list of people assigned to it. A shift with no positions cannot hold anybody., the Assign tab is where you put people into them. Select a shift on the roster calendar, then open Assign.

Roster → View → Assign

The tab lists each position on the shift with its staffing chip, who is currently assigned, and buttons to add more people.

Assign someone

Choose Assign people on a position to open the candidate list. Candidates are split into three groups, and each is hidden when empty:

• Available: no clashes. Assign these freely.
• Unavailable: the person has a clash with something else they said they are attending at your event, such as a panel they favourited. You can still assign them, and are asked to confirm.
• Shift conflicts: the person is already on another roster shift at that time.

Candidates are listed best-first. The ordering accounts for how much they are already rostered, how hard they are to schedule, and how well their tags fit, so working from the top of the list generally gives a balanced roster.

Each row shows how much work the person already has, their tags, and any warnings, such as being over eight hours for that day.

Resolving a shift conflict

Choosing Resolve on a double-booked candidate asks two questions in turn. First, whether to double-book them on both shifts. If you decline, it offers to move them instead, taking them off the other shift and putting them on this one. Take the second option unless you genuinely want someone in two places.

External people

Not everyone helping is a ticket holder. The External person box at the bottom takes a name and optional contact detail and assigns them to the position.

Note

External people are recorded on the roster for your own reference. Since they have no account, they do not get an agenda or reminder emails, so keep them in the loop the way you normally would.

Auto-fill

Auto-fill on a position takes the top-ranked available candidates and stages them until the desired headcount is reached. It skips anyone already over their daily hours unless you tick Include over-cap, and it never picks external people.

Note

Auto-fill stages people rather than assigning them outright. Its assignments are created as proposed, so nobody sees them yet and you can review before releasing. Assigning by hand does the opposite: it publishes immediately.

Proposed assignments hold the position’s capacity, so a position filled by auto-fill reports as full while you review it. That is what stops the places being taken before you publish.

Candidate ranking considers up to 100 eligible ticket holders. On a large volunteer pool, treat auto-fill as a strong starting point and review the result rather than taking it as final.

Eligibility is a guide

EligibilityThe ticket tags a position expects someone to hold, matched either as all tags or any tag. Eligibility guides who the system suggests for a position, but never blocks you: assigning someone who does not match is allowed and simply records that the requirement was overridden. tags shape who gets suggested, and they do not block you. Assigning someone whose tags do not match succeeds, and the assignment records that the requirement was overridden. External people are always recorded that way, since they hold no tags.

This keeps a missing tag from stopping you filling a gap an hour before doors. Where a qualification genuinely matters, such as first aid cover, it is worth checking those positions directly.

Publishing

An assignment is either proposed or published. Publishing is what makes it real: the shift lands on the person’s agenda and their reminders are set up.

Action	Where	Effect
Assign by hand	Assign tab	Published straight away
Auto-fill	Assign tab	Staged as proposed, not visible to anyone
Publish on a person	Assign tab	Moves that proposed assignment to published
Publish on a group	Groups page	Publishes every assignment in the group

The usual pattern is to auto-fill and hand-assign your way through the roster, review it, then publish each group once when you are happy.

Unpublish is the reverse of publishing. It puts the assignment back to proposed and takes the shift off the person’s agenda, while keeping their place on the position. Use it when you want to reconsider someone without losing their slot to another candidate.

Removing someone

Remove cancels the assignment and frees the slot for someone else, taking the shift off that person’s agenda. The difference from unpublish is the slot: remove gives it up, unpublish holds it.

Neither sends the person a message, so let them know directly if the roster had already been published.

When a ticket is cancelled

If a volunteer cancels or transfers their ticket, their assignments are cancelled automatically and the shift comes off their agenda.

Note

On a transfer, the previous holder comes off the roster and the position is left open rather than being filled by the new ticket holder. It is worth a look over your roster after a run of cancellations or transfers to pick up any positions that have dropped below their required number.