Pledge page technical requirements brainstorming

⚡️ Infrastructure Website
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#1

Hey rebels, I’ve received some requirements from the lovely @Vee around setting up a pledge page with public stats, image submissions, map, etc.

This was also following a chat we had with @ageorge, after which I set up a very simple prototype using XR’s LimeSurvey instance. Here are the links to that:

Here are the messages I received detailing the requirements (@Vee please let me know ASAP if you’re not OK with me re-posting these and I’ll delete the topic).

I would like to get a page up asking people to pledge to rebel.

We will tell them to pack a rebel bag, post photos of their bag packed… then when the time is right they will receive a txt saying “ok in 24 hours, go here”

For the website there are two key components:

  • The Action Network document embedded with pictures
  • A counter of how many people have pledged to rebel

It would also be really nice to have a visual map of how much room we will take up.

I’m unsure how to proceed, as some parts of these requirements are challenging, particularly the map. LimeSurvey seems like a very versatile form tool, so it should also support image uploads and other things, but it takes a fair bit of work to make something look beautiful, and it can’t do everything.

It would be good to bounce some ideas off and get clear on which requirements are deal-breakers and which are just nice-to-haves.

Once the requirements are clear and prioritised, that will allow us to compare other tools, then proceed onto other questions like hosting, data security, etc. if required.

The more context the better – digging into the underlying purpose and understanding how the solution will be used will allow us to find a better solution.

Also, what is the proper name of the action this is associated with, if it has one?

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#2

Just a heads up. There is a similair-ish tool in development that allows people to pledge to doing actions. If a certain threshold is met then the action takes place.

The tool is in development and is being supported by several groups including Friday’s For Future and XR. Apparently progress has stalled though.

Unfortunately that’s all the information I have on it. You might be able to learn more by reaching out internationally.

#3

A central aim of the Australian Mass Mobilisation is to make people’s commitment to collective action deeper and more concrete. This has been done in previous movements through people writing, signing or reading a pledge. The plan is to provide a pledge campaign platform which can be filled out, either in person ( paper form) or online ( digital form ), which commits those choosing to sign it to engage in civil disobedience, in a number of various possible roles, at a predetermined time and location as part of an Extinction Rebellion Action. It is hoped that this pledge platform will become one of the various forms of engagement that Extinction Rebellion groups around the country and the world find beneficial leading up to large acts of Mass Participation Civil Disobedience to increase both the number of attendees participating and also to increase and communicate the level of commitment of those participating.

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#4

Hey @Mad_Mattho, I’ve moved your post to a topic I started about it, and moved the topic to the AusMM category, let me know if any issues.

We’ve been thinking about the best way to accomplish this but haven’t cracked it yet…

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#5

Sweet, I will make contact with @Vee (violet and I have already chatted actually ) and @ageorge . I am working on this from an AusMM Actions team subgroup position currently but enjoy getting people from anywhere in the movement to contribute as I think that is what makes XR work so well, so I will invite people interested in helping progress this cause to get involved. There have been a few other rebels express interest in this to me and I will send them links to this base to get them in here. Thanks…

http://auspledge.wpengine.com ( don’t share widely please )

AMM_Pledge.docx (19.2 KB)

I have drafted a basic landing page (wordpress ) > signup form ( WPForms ) > mailing List Manager ( Mailchimp ) just to get this in a format that is shareable for comment. Only for rebel eyes right now, and I look forward to the conversation about the “ideal” or best or better implementation that this will lead to. Exciting. Also, I made this doc to go with it but once again, just a draft for now. I am helping setting up a team inside the AMM project, we have submitted mandates and there are about 5-6 roles that we hope to get filled when that project gets rolled out very soon…

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#6

Hey team!

Great to see movement here! I think that VIC are going to be a beta test for the pledge system before rolling out in Aus mm. I have a doc with the actions that should be finalised tonight and all the questions as well.

Once they are a go, I would like this pledge page up asap - if possible. Could we have a meeting with someone from the team and you two asap?
We have a meeting tonight, I will ask someone to volunteer to sort out when, unless one of you can make the meeting.

Zoom details

Today, Monday May 25, 2020 07:30 PM Pacific/Guam

Join Zoom Meeting

#7

Hi @Vee, I have another meeting at 8pm, so will need to see if I can move that, otherwise I may only be able to attend the first half hour.

#8

If you feel up for it, but don’t burn yourself out. Zoom fatigue is a thing. We should get through some good project updates by that time though so you will get a good picture of where we are at. Happy to update you later though, we take good minuets.

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#9

Doh, I just got this too late tonight, would love to have listened in on that action planning session, after a chat with Hugh and Chris I am under the impression that to get this pledge system up and running in a well structured and designed, permanently implemented and strongly secure kind of way we will need to let the IT guys thrash out the infrastructure solution for a bit amongst themselves and figure out how this would fit into the existing infrastructure… However, if there are no objections I think that a “Hacked together” trial on an action such as the one you are planning Violet may yield the more-complete list of requirements that can be implemented in the final “proper” version. Can I ask what the timeframe is for that action (I am guessing ASAP?)?
Do you have a link to the minutes from that meeting?
I think we could get something up and running that does the bare minimum functionality fairly quickly if we needed, even if it meant updating the number of pledgees manually and making the pledgee data available to a set person in the action planning team in that action? What do you all think?

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#10

Hi there,
I was actioned to liaise with you all re the Pledge.
The action is planned to take place on June 20, so the timeframe for launching the pledge and promoting is very short, as we have decided the action date on the basis that we can hopefully have the Pledge website up and ready by early next week (June 1-3).
Do you think that’s feasible/how soon could the website be up if it is a “hacked together” trial?
In comparison roughly how long are you thinking it would take for a more fine-tuned one to be built?
However, due to the timeframe, I am sure that anything that can get up and running within the next week would be great.
Here are the running meeting minutes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vYvjHzsyD39YqUrhHN0Qd2HKF-D7-nRqy5eXnCC3rDo/edit?usp=sharing

#11

Hi, the first thing I’d need is a temporary name for the URL (Happy to buy one ) for this trial rollout - I was thinking something like:

takethepledge.earth
rebelspledge.earth
pledgetoresist.earth
pledgetodefend.earth

suggestions?

#12

Weren’t we going to use subdomain like pledge.ausrebellion.earth?

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#13

That would be ideal, yes, and I expect that is where this will end up, not sure if it will happen fast enough to get this rolling for you all ASAP though, I will take this conversation back to Chris and Hugh (IT) and see what they think, I assume they will be monitoring this thread too…

#14

Thanks for lowdown @Marco-4-Planet-Earth. That doesn’t give us much time at all — what’s driving the urgency? Is that a hard timeline or is there room to move?

If that’s all the time we’ve got, we’ll need to get clear together very quickly on:

  1. what is the MVP (minimum viable product) to get this over the line; and
  2. what features are only nice to have.

That wpengine site @Mad_Mattho set up, is that just a mockup or a working product? Are there plans to involve a designer to give it some polish? Or does the audience not matter too much here — who’s meant to see it?

Does this all make sense? Do you understand what I mean in terms of confirming requirements? It’s impossible to tell how long it will take to get something up until we confirm what “it” is supposed to be. If “it” is that wpengine site, then technically it’s already “up”, it just needs to be linked up to the subdomain. But it seems like that site isn’t ready, so let’s get clear what work is remaining.

I don’t think getting the pledge subdomain going will be a big deal (@HyperNexus correct me if I’m wrong).

#15

Getting the pledge subdomain up can be done quickly. There’s no need to spend money on the domain.

As part of a regenerative culture we support the privacy of rebels. That means keeping their data safe and secure. There are rebels with higher security needs and so it’s important that we take this side of things seriously.

I think we would want an experienced developer to be assessing the security of the project. It’s worth flagging that:

  • Wordpress is known to have security issues and may not be the best platform to build this on.
  • organise.earth should not be used for Action Planning. Read more about this here.

It would make sense to deploy this onto the XR Australia branch server so that @xrauadmin is able to include in backups, ensure that software is appropriately updated, etc. Hosting on wpengine is not a good idea.

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#16

Just flagging that I have checked in with the person who notified me about this. Will be sure to post updates in this thread.

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#17

I just started this mindmap, I can invite you all to edit if you sign up to Miro, or else I can using a gmail account, will look at other options.

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_krlJVoU=/

I made suggestion for using (Craft CMS / Limesurvey / Mailtrain) as opposed to (wordpress / wpforms / mailchimp) as a possible solution following on from a few conversations recently, but not my call…

Also suggest we discuss and try to form a concensus around pledge.ausrebellion.earth for the landing page URL?

Pledge Group Mandate - Google Sheets

I am currently adding in links for pages that I have done rough outlines for, I have a contact in AUSMM Media and Massaging (Gary) who will be going over the content text for each and every stage of final version prior to going live.
I have a Role in the mandate for someone to be the IT Guru that makes it look XR’ish.
I hope that we end up filling these roles, if interested please feel free to get involved, in terms of the SOS for this Project… This team / group is currently sitting inside the actions subgroup of the AusMM project as a sub-group, and has links to legals, M&M etc… Feel free to comment on the mandate / roles as well…

#19

I should have mentioned that there’s not a hard timeline (only a preferred date was chosen at the last meeting which may have to be changed depending on website launch). The urgency seems to primarily come from the desire and ‘need’ for XR to ‘re-emerge’ with actions as soon as possible to give XR a key role in the narrative moving forward and play the emergency alarm role among others.

  • I would say the MVP would be a website similar to the ‘wpengine’ one, with the essential features being; pledge button (which then asks whether people want to be involved in arrestable or non-arrestable action or a support role) and a financial support button. But @Vee might have more thoughts on this? (As with that website, i think the number of pledges, more info and obviously a form to upload contact info into is important.)

  • So basically I think that mpengine website is suitable in its content, however, the one thing I think that should perhaps be different to the mpengine site is that; on the opening page there should be two boxes; 1. "Take the Pledge " or something similar and 2. “Pledge financial support.” So that people who take the pledge then indicate whether they want to pledge to take part in a arrestable or non arrestable action or as support (so three categories, since for the first day of action it is up to teams whether they get arrested or not, so I think its important theres a non arrestable option that is still an acton not support).

The Audience of the pledge will hopefully be a large demographic, due to the varying action entry levels.

I hope that answers some of your questions,

Sorry for the slow reply

#20

Questions.docx (2.9 MB)

We would ideally like this up by the 5th June as the action date chosen is the 20th. This is the content of the pledge questions is attached - I think it’s very important to be able to embed the pictures with the action descriptions and to use XR colours on the pledge page.

The messaging team is due to have the copy for the page by Monday night 7pm - our next meeting, which I invite you to.

There will also be a promo video which would be great to be able to embed on the pledge page.

To the User experience:
page 1:
Video + approved copy
2 links Pledge and Donate
When they click pledge it goes to the webform with the questions attached

Hope that makes sense, please email me if you would like to get the zoom link for Mondays meeting.

#21

Hi all, I have been doing some research and taking in the suggestions from everyone so far, I am thinking that we should all probably have a zoom meeting soon to discuss some of these issues in this thread, or I can Phone everyone individually? I will try and come into the Monday meeting @Vee if you can get me a link and time?

@Vee Violet and @Marco-4-Planet-Earth Marco I have read your comments above and what you are after can be done for you, I can’t get it done under a “best practices” scenario by then, but I could get you this functionality in a way that gets the job done, I am just a little apprehensive about not doing this the “best practices” way and offending anyone…

I thought I’d post a few links here to support the ways in which pledges work, A pledge is a “temporal landmark”, ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23066883/) to use one effectively, follow these suggestions based on feedback from trials (online pledges):

https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/recycle-challenge/research/making-it-stick-using-online-pledges-to-sustain-behaviour-changes

Do Pledges work?

A pledge can be a temporal landmark that spurs goal initiation when we signal the pledge action triggers a “new beginning”. (Our relationship to our government?, a new action-based self?). Creating and emphasizing a temporal landmark marking the beginning of a new time period increases people’s intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, people’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self.

I think the pledge itself is a temporal landmark, as is the final massive third wave of action we are building up to. I like the concept of “Strength in numbers, mass participation civil disobedience works, this changes everything!” to emphasize the size of this temporal landmark in all of our lives.

ALSO

After talking with Hugh we discussed failings with using Action Network for this purpose (lives on US server (bad 5 eyes), clause in XR contract to not use for illegal stuff or whole account is terminated) - an option was to use AN for forms and database but NOT for communicating the emails with content discussing breaking the law, use another mail app (mailtrain?). Also we discussed using a wordpress as a CMS and finding someone to “lock down the installation” - XR UK uses wordpress for main site…

Alternatively I suggested using something similar to what I have implemented using [ wordpress / wpforms / mailchimp ] by using inhouse installations of [ Craft CMS / Limesurvey / Mailtrain ].

Alternatively I remain completely open to hearing suggestions from anyone else of a suitable platform to do this on?