If you see a red tag on a machine and notice that it is not blocked out on Skedda please flag either to Discourse or one of the stewards. We are getting people who come in only to find that a machine is down and hasn’t been marked as such in Skedda.
If you are red tagging or flagging a machine to be red tagged, please follow up to make sure it is also blocked out on Skedda. Red tags don’t automatically map to Skedda and a human has to get involved to do so.
I understand that this is extra work for the person reporting the problem. However, we’re all in this together and you will likely be on the benefiting side of this far more often than you are on the extra work side of this.
Of course, if somebody knows how to automate all this including Skedda, Neon, and the report, I suspect we’ll all be pretty receptive to any proposals.
I’m going to raise an aspect of this that we don’t have a good strategy for. And we are wide open to ideas. There are some machines that won’t get blocked on skedda - the bandsaws are the most recent and pertinent example. Those machines being down will not cause us to block a skedda slot for the woodshop.
Outside of it being mentioned on discourse, and hoping everyone looks at discourse to see that the machine is down.
I don’t know the specific possibilities of automation, but I hope there might be some ways to improve this workflow.
Just brainstorming on situations like what @stepho mentioned with the bandsaws that are one-of-many tools in a single Skedda space, I wonder if Skedda might be able to put up a conditional notice while making a new booking that warns users “Tool X is not available”? And/or maybe we can rig something to (semi-)automatically email booking-holders when a relevant tool has a status change?
The biggest roadblock I’ve found trying to automate something sensible is that Skedda is an absolute black hole. The only way to get bookings is to click through a bunch of admin menus and download a utilization report (think it might even be an .xls ! )
It wouldn’t be too hard to have “red tag” automations that mark a machine as unavailable in the wiki, or make a discourse post or send an email, but I haven’t found any way to do something sensible on the skedda front (either mark a machine as unavailable, or email folks with future bookings)
If somebody had a clever way to screen-scrape skedda bookings, I’m all ears.
ps: I’m very much not a web developer, if that wasn’t already abundantly clear
Is there any way to dynamically update the pop-up window for booking in skedda? If so, could it pull from a table of red-tagged tools based on which area and time-slot was being booked?
I can see how it would work from a data side, but I have no idea what the available data from both sides would look like or what’s possible on the platform.
At minimum, if we had a page that listed red-tagged tools in multi-tool slots like the woodshop, we might be able to drop a link in the pop-up with a reminder to check the list of currently red-tagged. As long as it wasn’t a pain in the butt to keep updated, at least.
As for random tools, can we create an “RedTag–general” (or other name) as the first slot that only admins/stewards are authorized to edit?
That would serve as a catchall and we could put the specific machine that is red tagged in the booking title. It’s not the best, but it would at least allow us to have a “red tag” in Skedda that people could check.
Do we have access to the servers/dbs where we host the wiki/skedda/website? Would probably be fairly easy to write a one page status dashboard (red light / green light) for all the tools and a simple admin for managing…. I would volunteer for that depending on system access….
@doug.squires This is right along the lines of something the stewards have talked about implementing pretty recently, but haven’t been able to tackle yet.
We all agree that it’s something we can definitely do better than the current system. Like Jon said, Skedda is not great on this front (they don’t even have an accessible API), but something on the Wiki side should be pretty doable. If we can integrate it with the problem reporting QR code/Google form, even better.
If you’re volunteering, I’ll get in touch with you this week via PM to talk specifics. Thank you!
