Self Management of a Very Large Group

I have been using Fibery to manage my project and now we are entering a new phase and I would like to understand the feasibility of Fibery for our new needs.

We are a participatory consumer cooperative, a community supermarket, where people organize themselves into voluntary shifts. We currently have 40 people in the project, but we should open our doors in 3 months and we will hopefully have more than 500.

I have been trying to use Fibery to organize work shifts, but it has been a bit frustrating. Let me explain. The idea is for each person to have their own login and be able to manage their shift changes and cancellations. I tried to make each person have a Guest account (since paying for 500 member users would be absolutely unfeasible. We are a non-profit supermarket). However, guests cannot press buttons or fill out forms within Fibery.

I then tried using Fibery forms on our website, so that people outside the system could enter new information (it worked perfectly for registrations). However, there is no way to guarantee that the person who entered the information is the person they say they are (there is a field on the form for a name). And I also have to rely on automations that send emails instead of having a quick response on the return screen to inform whether the shift was in fact canceled, changed or created.

So I wonder, would Fibery be a possible platform for managing the voluntary shifts of our cooperative supermarket?

Could you describe in more details what this Guest user will usually do?

This guest user would have to be able to exchange his voluntary shifts with another user. For example, he would assign one of his shifts for exchange and choose the shifts date and hour that he would be up to do. So the owners of those shifts would see on their screen that there is someone interested on exchanging their shifts. And then they would be able to accept it, for example clicking a button.

I was trying to work with this form:

ā€œCooperanteā€ is a list of all the members; ā€œTurno de Trabalho a Ser Trocadoā€ is a list of the shifts that are scheduled. I wish that when I choose the member, the list of scheduled shifts below would show only the chosen member on the first field scheduled shifts, for example… That would be one possibility.

There is no reason why a guest cannot press a button on an entity to which they have editor access. Of course, if the button contains actions which they do not have the permission to execute, it will not be possible to do these.

What are the involved dbs, and the relations between them?

Oh wow!

Coming back here to say that this is new for me. I was probably not aware of the permissions settings or missed one of the updates.

Great! I’ll keep working here.

So I’m working with databases: work shifts, users, work shift scheduled…

But now I’m kinda managing to design something.

I have one question though.

Is it posbile to change what is written on the box to enter the information? Instead of ā€œAdd new Pedidos de Troca to Pedidos Feitos (Turnos que Poderia Fazer) listā€ writte ā€œChoose the shift you are interested to switchā€?

Sorry! I made a mistake…

I thought I was able to push the buttons but that was because I was accessing through my Member account.

As I said, I will work with more then 500 guests and I wanted them to be able to create a new entity. Is that posible? What button permissions can a Guest have?

Guests can edit and comment, but not create new entities. Even through button presses.

Depending on your use case there may be work arounds.

  1. Public Form View. Send them to a public form.
  2. Automate the new entity for them to to just edit. So in this case, every shift also has a ā€œChange Requestā€ Automatically created. Then the users can select the shift they want to change in the created entity rather than create a new one.
  3. Use automations instead of button presses to create. (I think this is the best bet, but might be patched by Fibery in some future, as it might be seen as exploiting the system) Here’s how it works:
    The button press does not create a new entity, all it does is edit a field, then checks a checkbox field in the existing entity. Then an automation runs when the checkbox field is checked in order to create a new entity, (and also clear the checkbox and the button input). This is simulating a ā€œCreate entity using buttonā€ for guests, with a bit of a workaround. Lmk if this makes sense!

From what I’m experiencing, Observers/Guests can’t edit either…

I tried to edit a checkbox and it’s not posible… Is that what u meant on number 2?

Observers can’t, but guests can. They are a different mechanism.

See difference here:

Not sure if using guests is scalable to 500 people though, as you can’t auto share based on entity user field… You’d need to share entities manually.

I think some kind of limited user pricing would be very nice for Fibery to have. To allow for guests to get access via people field. Not sure this use case is possible right now without paying for a membership for each person.

Well, that’s kind of the point of Guests. They are free users, but are somewhat limited in what they can do, and the admin needs to do manual work to grant them access.
If you don’t want the manual work, or you want them to be more capable, you can make them Members.

It’s understandable that for some use cases, this is too black-and-white, and customers might want to pay a small amount for users to have a bit greater capabilities, but it’s pretty tricky to devise pricing tiers which accommodate every possible situation.

Agreed! It’s tricky, and I’m not suggesting to give more for free. I do think people would pay for it, but what to give for what price is indeed a very big question.

I’ve seen some platforms separate it by email address, business email addresses VS personal email addresses. Not sure if that’s viable/secure against loopholes.

I don’t have a clean solution. Looking at things like soft, retool, and other app builders that seperate team users vs external users could help.

Maybe usage pricing? I don’t know.

Fibery (the tech) can be used in many different ways. It would be nice to have accommodating pricing options to allow for the different cases. Not an easy task for sure, but something to that could allow adoption of organizations that don’t necessarily make more money per user. As in, orgs where more people on the team does not mean more revenue.

It sounds like you’re trying to use Fibery as a scheduling software. Scheduling softwares can be found for as little as $2/user.

I think your best option for the current need is to integrate. I’ve tried building a scheduling system in Fibery and it’s pretty tricky to configure things like availability and time off request.

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The best idea I have for a cheaper, limited paid user is to have users that only get editor access to one database.

This would allow Fibery to compete with these $2/user scheduling systems. And even offer client portals that don’t balloon cost to extensively when adding clients to your system.

This could be really interesting!
Or it’s like 1€ per database with editor or creator access.

Then in the access templates, it tells you how much it costs for a guest to get this access template.

Then guests are more expensive if they have access to a more complex system, ie. more value. The simpler the system, the cheaper it is per guest. And guests who just needed read / comment access are free (like observers)

This would require a new feature of ā€œCreate only related to thisā€, so that users can only create entities related to the one they have access to, and not full submitter access to the DB, but I believe this is on the roadmap somewhere. But this is also quite tricky bc if they have edit access to the one they create, they could just create then unlink, so this might need a bit more thought.

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Observers and Guests are the exact same thing, right? Is just because Guests is the old name for Observers. Or is there any difference?

I saw this image on Fibery’s Help and got confused… cause there arre both Guests AND Observers…

Please check out the following guide on difference between roles

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Got it! So for an observer to become a guest he would have to quit Fibery… right?

Ok, so I’m trying the public form option for now.

I have a list of dates for the person to choose and would like it to sort by date… Is it possible? (Not sure what’s the standard sort criteria now…)

It should be the rank order