[KI-LC] Automatic way to total voting participation

[Eve Maler]

Hi all-- I had promised to look into how we can "auto-total" rosters of voting participants to make roll call and quarterly reporting easier.  If you are using and keeping up with a substantial roster page for your group, I think I've found a way.  You can see the LC roster, which was my test bed, for an example:

http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/display/LC/Roster

The bottom row with the bold total in it automatically counts voting participants only.  (This is a good check on the "Quorum is..." statement at the top of the page; I recently had a small problem with this in the UMA group.)

How can you get this for your your roster page?  Use the the Tools->View Wiki Markup menu option on the LC page to see its source code, or click this link:

http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/pages/viewpagesrc.action?pageId=4816995

First, this roster table uses the {table-plus} macro; you'll need to use that if you're not already.  It's handy for dynamically sorting columns individually anyway.  You'll also need to represent voting vs. nonvoting participants as "1" vs. "0" instead of "Yes" vs. "No".  The LC roster table code starts like this:

{table-plus:columnTypes=S,I,S,S,S|autoNumber=true|sortColumn=2|sortDescending=true|autoTotal=true|} 
|| Group or role represented || Voting (yes=1) || Primary rep || Alternate rep || Comments ........

(Note that the sortColumn=2 and sortDescending=true parameters ensure that your table always comes up with the voting participants listed first, which is handy for roll call!  Full macro documentation is available at http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/renderer/notationhelp.action .)

Here's what I did to make the table auto-count the voting participation was:

1. Change the column type of the second column from "S" (string) to "I" (integer)
2. Add "autoTotal=true|" to the end of the table-plus parameter line
3. Change the column header that used to be Yes/No for voting participation to "Voting (yes=1)"
4. Change the "Yes" entries in that column to "1" and the "No" entries to "0"

Not only does this give you a handy check on total voting participation, but now you can look into the change history of the page (assuming the code was in place then) to get that precise number on the last quarterly boundary.  But even without the code in place, you can look at the change history to see what your roster said in the past.  (Since 2010-Q4 reports will be due soon, you can try this for seeing how your participation changed from 30 Sep 2010!) To get to the change history for your own roster:

1. Click the "(view change)" link near the top of your roster (for the LC roster it's http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/pages/diffpages.action?pageId=4816995&originalId=45058258 )
2. Click the "View Page History" link shown next to the change-count shown on the page-comparison page that comes up (for the LC roster it's http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/pages/viewpreviousversions.action?pageId=4816995 )
3. Find the versions of interest, such as the versions that bracket a quarterly boundary, and click on them in turn.

I suspect that your friendly KI staff member can help you set this up if you want, or you can feel free to ask me for help.  I for one plan to apply this to the UMA roster shortly...

Have fun,

	Eve



Eve Maler                                  http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog
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