Roles and Relationships in Events

I'm copying out jimw's recent comments (http://groups.drupal.org/node/465#comment) to begin a separate thread.

jimw brings up a couple of issues that has been talked about at some length. Specifically he is interested in roles like "volunteer", "presenter" etc. as they relate to Events:

As was touched on in the above irc chat, it seems that a user can have multiple relationships to a given event, based on different roles. So, for example, you could be a definite attendee at an event and also a volunteer and also a presenter. You could be any of those 3 things (roles), and the status on each could be different, as well as the reply time.

By role here, I don't necessarily mean login role, just the concept of a role at an event, or event_role

So, this could be kept in a central table, but unique key would be uid + nid + erid (event_role_id)

CREATE TABLE event_user (
uid int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
nid int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
erid int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
reply_time int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
reply int(2) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
UNIQUE KEY uid_nid_erid (uid,nid,erid)
);

I think the concept of presenter is an important one to get into the overall event area Presenter could be modelled as a user; or have it's own table; or be a category; or an organic group, I'm not sure ...

I say this because a presenter at an event is often not a single human, but a band (music), a group (theater), a team of some kind. But perhaps requiring that it be a user is not a bad thing, since organizations can always have a user account if they want. For many sites which publicize events to the general public, like online newspapers, etc, the presenter is the most important piece of data. You can currently put this info into the text description of the event, but this makes searches inconsistent, provides no accessible list of all presenters, no easy view of all events a given presenter will be holding (their tour schedule) etc. Also, some events have multiple presenters (2 bands at a show, 3 speakers at a discussion, etc).

The above table could hold a variety of roles, while also letting you query by nid and uid alone, to see the various aspects of the event a user is involved with. Other event roles are things like coordinator, food-provider, ticket-seller, whatever. This kind of structure will let the event creator define the total structure of the event, all the roles that need to be filled, and then see how they are doing.

So, you might want an additional table, that declares what event_roles are in use at the event and how many of each are needed or allowed (in the case of attendees, for example):

CREATE TABLE event_role_quantity (
nid int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
erid int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
min_quantity int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
max_quantity int(10) unsigned NULL default '0',
UNIQUE KEY nid_erid (nid,erid)
);

I'm fairly new at Drupal, so perhaps you all can better comment on whether to make the master list of possible event roles correspond to login roles, or to keep a separate, master event_role table.

also there was this comment:

I wrote a comment on another thread which has some ideas about presenters (performers, speakers, etc) and other roles at events
http://drupal.org/node/52895#comment-119869

Wondering how that could be modelled here.

Seems like you could add an EventRole class specifying what roles/jobs must be filled for an event, including simple attendees; volunteers (people who do specific work); presenters; etc ... and what quantities of each of these are required for the Event. Different EventEmails can be allowed for each EventRole (one email text is used for inviting regular attendees; another for requesting volunteers).

Then can add an EventRoleID (erid) to EventParticipant as you have it above. This would mean one User could have > 1 EventParticipant instances for a given Event, if they are doing > 1 significantly different things in relation to the Event. You might say, well, everybody is at least an attendee; but in many Events in real life, the various flavors of staff and presenters are not counted in the attendance numbers, they don't receive a ticket, etc.

Modelling the Administrator separately as you have it seems to make sense in that it's a Drupal function online they are performing
Whereas the actual onsite organizer at the physical Event would correspond to an EventRole.

It seems like this is all good. My interest would be in figuring out the specific use cases having to do with those roles. Ideas? Comments?