I know others have had various questions along the way about membership types, something that would be useful for our project and sharing what we do with both landowners and neighbouring projects, is an ‘observer’ type membership role, that would allow the user to see assigned traps and reports, but not be able to edit or input any data.
This would be for being able to share more specific information with people from outside our project, but without them being able to change anything either on purpose or accidentally! At the moment a neighbouring project manager has requested to be part of our project just to see what is going on and to look at more data, but with them as just a ‘trapper’ they are unable to see anything without being assigned traps. As they are not actually part of our project I am reluctant to give them the ability to potentially make changes, but I am quite happy to share with them where our traps are and what they are catching.
Other times I see it as being useful is if a landowner is interested in what we are doing and exactly where traps are on their property, and what they are catching.
I also think that it would be useful. I am a trapper in 2 projects. In one I can see the locations and data for all the traps and bait stations in the project. In the other project I can only see data for my own traps. I guess that it depends on the co-ordinator what access they give and it would be good for me if they had the option to give read only data from the whole project.
After further investigation I have figured that for a person who wants/needs to see all installations but not be able to modify any, you can make them an ‘Advanced Trapper’ and not assign them any traps. This doesn’t help for people who you only want to be able to see certain traps rather than everything in the project.
Snells Shoreline Conservation Community works with council regarding trapping on council land in our area, with predator free New Zealand for backyard trapping, and with Restore Rodney East, as well as others. Council (biodiversity and parks) wants to be able to follow our progress (fair enough), and there is now an umbrella group that is looking at a predator-free peninsula that would like access to the different groups projects in the area to identify both where there is opportunity to fill a gap in trapping efforts and to monitor what is being caught where. For privacy reasons, I think it would be good to have a observer member type that has access to a subset of reports (trap types, catches - not by-trapper or other possible privacy issue type reports), and preferably not the specific location of traps (or trappers assigned), but rather how many traps of what type are deployed in an grid area (or the ilk) and the catch results. I’m sure others will have thoughts on this as well. I’d like to be able to share data with council/other area projects, but for it to be effective for them to use (e.g. ability to run some reports), while being mindful of peoples privacy that are participating in a given project (subset of reports and grouping of traps within a grid area rather than giving specific locations).
Thanks Tui for raising this one. It is certainly a topic that has been on our minds for a long, and we have bounced many ideas. At some point we will add more membership levels, and a reporting/stats only membership might be the first.
Possibly higher level than you’re looking for, but just to add it to the mix for people who don’t know, there is the hex map which can be configured for single or multiple related/unrelated projects: