Proposed forms/spreadsheet redesign

[deniederhut]

So, the current workflow is:

1. someone submits recommendation form
2. we manually send a link to the recommended speaker
3. the speaker fills out another form
4. we go move cells manually to data sheet.

If we pre-populate the speaker info form with the recommendation data ( following these instructions ), we can eliminate the second manual step of copy-pasting data from one sheet to another.

There is another benefit to this approach. Google forms has an option to send the speaker a link to modify their response at a later date. This would allow them to update the information themselves, or remove themselves from the database at any time, without creating a security risk of allowing strangers into the data sheet.

However, this removes a bit of oversight, such that anyone could write anything and have it show up in the website (e.g. naughty things as specialties, swear words in the names).

[KirstieJane]

Hey @deniederhut - thank you so much for making this issue - it's a great point.

I've been thinking about automating these steps and I'm really confident I could write them super easily in python using this API https://github.com/burnash/gspread.

Plan would be to combine the two private sheets into the public data sheet, dropping any columns that contain personal information if the column Approved is true.

It would also be a really easy way to add in more information to the public Data sheet including the abbreviations etc.

The alternate would be to require a person to have looked at the data first, so, for example, instead of just having Approved being true, there would also be a third sheet called Moderation that contained a Checked column that verified a human had taken a look at the information and there weren't rude words etc :)