Mandatory releasing Wing / Region Activities to all eligible cadets

As you say - “should”. I would say even if you are undersubscribed - after all, would you still want aforesaid little Jimmy on your camp lol? Having said all that, the old system wasn’t perfect - I have been camp com where little Fred has turned up having been selected by his Sqn OC with no TG23 needed. Fine, until we had to call 999 because of something which should have been declared caused a problem (RAF Police, MPGS, Paramedic and SMO all turned up lol), followed by 2 staff spending 15 hrs with him in hospital (2 hrs drive away). Mum’s reaction when asked to fetch him home? “It’s a long way for me to drive, can’t you transport him?”. I politely reminded her that it was the same distance for me to drive as it was for her!

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1 - I think it only does that with sub apps (which now seem to be “The Thing”). I have just checked 2 non-sub-apped activities where I have cadets attending and it doesn’t show that.
2 - If I look at the “Units” tab, it tells me I have 8 cadets and one staff at an event. Not quite, 8 cadets put in a bid but 4 were rejected. With that logic I imagine it would still have 8 cadet attending even if all 8 were rejected.
3 - That’s hardly a notification is it? As others have said, bar checking every event on the dashboard on a regular basis, sqn staff would never know.

I would have expected this to be the norm - is it not?

SMS allows you the activity Commander to allocate cadet spaces per unit - what happens if there are more bids, than there are allocated spaces?
I thought it was down to a conversation between the activity Commander and the cadet’s OC…

I would have also expected a squadron commander to be able to veto a cadet’s bid - or at the very least, be able to flag the bid to the activity Commander, to then discuss the matter.

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We had a system that worked for years and still does; sheet goes up on the wall, mention in parade notices, cadets put their name down if they fancy it, cadets do whatever it was.
Then some bright spark thought Sqn Cdrs don’t tell cadets about things so we need some whizzy online thing cadets will be all over it like chicken pox and we can cut the Sqn Cdrs out of the process. But cadets aren’t on it and sqn cdrs are still deciding the latter is how it should be. For all the reasons mentioned above as to why the OC should be the final arbiter. I have for years because I speak to cadets to see what their interests are and encourage them to speak to us about them, so we can target them for specifics they are interested in.
So we need to have a system where the OC/Adj/TO get a trawl notice for things thrown open to all, Sqn Cdrs look to see if it fits, raise the sign up sheet, which could be generated automatically and crack on. Advise cadets they have been selected and go from there.

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A sign up list report is available and built in

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Say there are 30 sqns in the Wing and your event has one cadet from each sign up.

Are you going to have 30 separate conversations with 30 different OCs about your event…?

That’s a better reflection of the reality.

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In the context of my comment - that would suggest that each of the 30 squadrons we’re sending their worst behaved individual…!

Dear All OC,

Please see list below for bids for Ex Do Something. Are you content for your cadets attendance?

*I am your obedient servant *

AN Other Flt Lt

How had can it be???

A) It does exist. Two different events, one without attendees from my sqn, one with.
image

Very true, hopefully we can get the suggestion to the Units Dev Team that the attendees view needs to include any sub-apps, and even better if it can show the split across the different sub-apps.
But a scan through the list of events and a look at who’s signed up, especially if you’re only looking at events coming up in next 2-3 weeks is not so much work. SMS literally gives you the button already.
The whole point of SMS was digitising the burden, and centralising it, not reducing it.

The event I showed in the previous example, and the one in this post (same event) don’t have sub-apps.

If we go back to the days before Cadet Portal, we’d pin up a sign-up sheet to a noticeboard and need to check that noticeboard on a regular basis. only difference is a couple clicks rather than however many steps.

I don’t get this view on anything?

do you have any horizontal scroll?

Where are you seeing this view? As your icons are in a different order to mine?

If you go to My Events to view all and then toggle to table view, it comes up then.

But still, doesn’t show sub-apps.

Oh I see - would be handy to have that view icon on the dashboard.

Never noticed that as I had it set to “card”.

Thanks!

The two screenshots were from My Events in Table and List view.
and yep @GrandMaster_Flush, sub-apps only show up within the event they are a part of.

Trouble is, there is only so much you can practically fit on the dashboard.

But I might have cadets on events that I’m not on - just checking through here and I can see my cadets signing up for stuff all over the place that some would not have the prerequisites - I could have saved the activity commanders checking SMS if I was aware.

and that’s where we need to be checking regularly.

Personally I don’t want to be bombarded with notifications (email or otherwise) every time a cadet signs up for an event. Sure maybe a daily/weekly email digest would be nice, but I don’t think that adds any more benefit that directly looking through the event list at a time of my choosing.

I see your point - as a squadron we are pretty on it generally, and good with Bader (although clearly as just now I’ve learnt something new we are not perfect!) But I could save a lot of time if I could approve the cadet onto bid for the event.

We also now have a situation on squadron where we have some very specific issues with a cadet and I would like to be able to talk to activity commanders ahead of time, but they can just bid away and without manually checking every activity I don’t know what they have put themselves forward for…

Edit to add. Just checking through now (should probably be doing work!) and I can see three instances already where cadets are bidding for things they can’t actually do.

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