Three Rings

Iridium, the next milestone of Three Rings, is taking us a little longer than we expected. Perhaps that’s not surprising: this is turning out to be the biggest release of our nearly ten-year history, not just because of the number of improvements we’re adding in, but also because of the complexity of some of those features.

Right now, a lot of our time is devoted to increasing the speed at which Iridium can run our most exciting new feature, the Autopopulator. This is a tool we expect will be a huge help to those organisations that use Three Rings with what we call a “managed” rota system (as opposed to a “self sign up” system) and – as far as we can tell – it’s going to be the most sophisticated system of it’s type anywhere in the world, not just in rota management for helplines, but also for major organisations that automate their staffing patterns.

It’s very exciting, but it needs a little tinkering to get the speed up, because even computers can get sick of number crunching and start dragging their heels. We’re very keen to get this release finished, however, and we’re aiming to push to testing sometime in November.

Over the next few days and weeks, we’re going to be highlighting some of the new features Iridium will provide, and going into more detail over some of them. Watch this space!  (And, if you’re interested in joining our testing team, and getting your hands on the Iridium features before anyone else, why not get in touch?)

We’re opening up the Three Rings Chat Room to the world!

For the last few years, the Three Rings team have from time to time used an “IRC” (Internet Relay Chat) chat room to coordinate their development efforts, which has been incredibly useful during periods in which our developers have been spread all over the UK. Now, we’ve decided to make it available to our users, too.

It’ll provide a space where you can chat informally with Three Rings staff and with other service users. If Three Rings staff are in the room (they’ll be clearly labelled with an “@” sign so you can tell which ones they are), you’ll also be able to get support on simple, quick-question issues: although contacting us by email will remain the central point of contact for all support-related issues (and, of course, the chat room isn’t suitable for support on confidential issues, owing to its public nature).

If you’ll like to come in for a chat:

• If you’re familiar with IRC, connect to #3r on Freenode.
• If not, just to to http://www.threerings.org.uk/chat for a web-based interface to access the chat room. You’ll need to choose a “nickname” that isn’t being used on the chat server.

Computers being set up for the Three Rings team on Code Week.

In case you didn’t know already, this week is Three Rings Code Week, where Three Rings developers take time off their “day jobs” to retreat to spend some time doing full-time volunteer work for Three Rings: so there’ll probably be Three Rings developers in the chat room during most daytimes! Come say hi and hear about what we’re working on on any given day!

In addition to Three Rings‘ efforts to help individual Nightlines, we’re also proud to support the efforts of the Nightline Association, an umbrella charity that represents the interests of Nightlines around the UK and Ireland. One of the ways we’ve been helping out recently is by providing a single-sign-on authentication mechanism so that Nightline volunteers can easily get access to Nightline Association resources… by using their Three Rings username and password!

The Nightline Association website, showing Three Rings as a login option.

Using a free and widely-supported standard called OpenID, Three Rings makes it possible for trusted third-party websites – such as that of the Nightline Association – to allow their members to have to remember only one username and password wherever they go. Now Nightline volunteers can use the trusted, security-tested Three Rings login system to get access to all kinds of resources shared through the Nightline Association website.

Nightlines and the Nightline Association benefit too. By not having to manage logins, it’s easier than ever to ensure that former volunteers and other unauthorised parties can’t get access to private information: the very second that their Three Rings account is put to sleep, a volunteer can no longer log in to Nightline Association services, either!

If your helpline uses other computer systems – for example; an intranet, an e-listening system, or any kind of members-only forum – and you’d like your volunteers to have the convenience of being able to log in to all of them with their Three Rings identity, get in touch and we’ll help you to make it happen. Single sign-on, backed by the power, safety, and convenience of Three Rings, is a great way to unify your computer systems and to simplify life for your volunteers.

The latest new release of Three Rings – Milestone: Hafnium – came out recently. We thought it might be nice to give those of you who follow the blog an explanation of some of the new features we’ve added. Today’s new feature is Information Sharing.

Data shared by Demonstration Branch with other organisations with which they're affiliated. (click to see a larger version)

Increasingly, we’re seeing networks of related organisations getting started with Three Rings. The majority of University Nightlines already use Three Rings, and most of these are affiliated through the Nightline Association. A radpidly-growing number of Samaritans branches are starting to use Three Rings, too, and these branches are associated with one another regionally and nationally through a treelike structure of affiliation.

We’d like to help these organisations to communicate with one another more easily, and this new feature is about doing just that. As of Milestone Hafnium, these helplines will be able to share information about their operation with other organisations within their affiliation “family”. Of course, we’re not Facebook, so everything in Three Rings’ new feature is strictly “opt-in”: that means that if you never touch this feature, nothing will ever be shared. But if you do choose to share basic information about your services, location, or volunteers, then that’s up to you. We hope that this will ultimately help affiliated helplines to work more-closely together and keep in touch, but that part is entirely up to you!

To get started, just click the My Organisation button in the Admin panel, or click on your organisation’s name in the bottom-right of the overview page. And as usual, we’d love to hear what you think!

Today’s “Featured Feature” from the Hafnium release of Three Rings is one of the one’s we’re most excited about:Drag-and-Drop rota management.

Right now, this is a very ‘bleeding edge’ facility, and we’d really like to know how different organisations use this feature, how they’d like it to work, and how we can make it better for them in the future.

With Drag-and-drop you can drag a volunteer from the ‘volunteer list’ onto an empty shift, from one shift to another shift, or from a shift they are on to ‘bin’. It should prove to run a lot faster to make adjustments to your rota – especially in those cases where a volunteer is simply moving from one shift to another.

Drag-and-drop in the Rota.

In the screenshot above, you can also see that this organisation has chosen to make the “understaffed” shifts appear red, rather than the default orange: that’s another new feature in this release – you’re able to customise the rota colours more than ever before. See the Localisation panel of the Admin tab for more details.

For now, Drag-and-drop only works in Week View, but we’re hoping it will really speed up the process of manually filling shifts, especially if you find yourself re-configuring your rota around special rota patterns, such as Christmas shifts. If you can find extra ways to make it work for you, that’s even better! We’d particularly love to hear from any rota administrators who give this feature a go, so please do feel free to get in touch!

Here’s another new feature we’re very pleased with: the Availability tool.

If you choose to enable the Availability tools for your users, they can now specify what times they are not available. Generally, Three Rings will behave the way it always has: it will assume that any volunteer is free to do a shift at any time. That’s usually OK, but it can make life harder when it comes to filling a shift at short notice – it’s not going to be worth asking Barney to cover the Wednesday evening shift if Barney has to work late every Wednesday.

This new feature lets Barney, and anyone else with fixed commitments, specify what they can’t do.

Availability information for a volunteer.

In the example above, Barney has provided two bits of information: firstly, he’s said that he can never cover a shift between 7 & 11 pm on a Monday, or between noon and 5.30 on a Friday. That means that when you’re trying to fill a shift that crosses those times, Barney’s name will appear at the bottom of the list, and if you try to sign him up for a shift, you’ll be warned in advance. Note that you can’t sign him up for a shift that runs from 12:00 – 15:00 on a Friday (ie, that is entirely within Barney’s period of unavailability), but you also can’t sign him on on a shift for a shift that runs Monday 22:30 – 01:00, because Barney won’t be available for at least the first 30 minutes of that shift.

The second bit of information Barney has given us is that he will be Inactive – not available for any shifts – between February 26th and March 11th. That works just the same as Inactive has always worked, and an inactive volunteer cannot be signed up to a shift. However, it’s now possible to specify Inactivity in advance: if you know you’ll be on holiday at the end of November, you can tell the system that right now, without having to wait until the last minute.

As usual, administrators have full control over these features and can “override” anything they need to. Availability is a very powerful tool for tracking when your volunteers can work, and we hope that one day it’ll help Three Rings to suggest the best people to do a shift, and perhaps even take some of the leg work out of contacting them and signing them up, too!

Things are getting pretty busy here at Three Rings – everything’s gearing up for the release of our latest version Milestone: Hafnium, which is due to start deployment in a little under two and a half hours. We’ve always enjoyed the few people who join us on release nights, staying up late at their own computers, so they can be among the first to see the new version as soon as it goes “live” – it somehow feels more real when you see a new release working outside the cosy sandbox of the beta tests!

With that in mind, we thought it might be nice to give those of you who follow the blog a “sneak peek” at one of the new features that we’ll be providing: Relationships.

The Relationships button: a new addition to the Admin tab.

Contrary to one tester’s first guess, this isn’t about helping you track the romantic relationships of the volunteers at your organisation (although you could use it for that if you wanted). Instead, this provides a way for you to “link” volunteers together in relationships like the “Mentor/Mentee” relationships seen at many different helplines. Once you’ve defined the relationships you’d like to track, you can simply go to a volunteer’s Directory page and link them with the other party in their relationship. Three Rings is smart enough to know that if Alice is Bob’s mentor, then it stands to reason that Bob is Alice’s mentee, so you don’t need to add both ends: just the ones that matter to you.

An example of a relationship tracked using Three Rings.

Of course: because this is Three Rings, flexibility is key, so if you use a different system (for example, the “Bourbon System”, where one volunteer has two minders) or if you call them different things (we met volunteers from one helpline, once, who called their more-experienced helpers “aunts and uncles”), Three Rings can handle that. You can track as many different types of relationships as you like, so if you have different mentoring schemes for different parts of your operation, it can all be managed in the same simple way.

A more frivolous example of a Three Rings relationship.

We’ll be coming back to the new features after the release has gone live, so we can talk about some of them in more depth. In the meantime, though, now seems like a good time to tell you about the Three Rings chat room we’ve set up for this release: if you go to the live Three Rings site any time after we take the system down for upgrade (that is, any time after 23:30, GMT today) you’ll see a link that will let you chat to some of us Three Rings volunteers, and to any other users who happen to be about (note that we’ll only be there during the downtime: if you visit once we’re back up again, you’ll probably find it’s empty!). Maybe we’ll see some of you there!