Collaboration Pool

seems like Eldon just need to adjust the settings,so sent him a message about it.

to all of you folks out there,that have like 30 000 + merge issues.
go in to your settings,and look at your left side on the page.
it is a box there,saying : include collaborators.

this box should be blank !
(unless you like the job it gives that is)

Tiffany Hord-Morris I'm new here, but I'm ready to learn! Thanks for the invite!

Private User

Count me in!
Private User

@Tim Stamps

Tim, your best bet would be to cancel you long-standing merge requests, and request to merge them again. With recent changes in Geni functionality around collaboration, chances are you can send the request to one of your collaborators, who will be willing to complete the merge for you.

@David Embry, is there a way to do this easily and quickly? I have about 24 pages of old requests. I know that's a personal problem but if you know of a shortcut, I'd be grateful. ;)

Tim - I have collaboration rights that are allowing me to take care of many of your merges

There are still certain individuals who control profiles, that have no other option. If a particular manager has been uncooperative for over a year, is there any way to appeal to the higher authorities to deal with them?

Well, there are privacy concerns. If, when a user joined, Geni had promised not to share their family info without their permission, then Geni can't ever share their family info unless they log back in and allow it. And there are a lot of abandoned accounts. When accounts are unresponsive, I copy over the useful info and then unmerge.

Since I joined the collaboration pool, I am getting requests to collaborate from many people here. I have accepted them all but I was hoping that the process of requesting and accepting collaborators who be automatic. I admit that nothing here indicated it would be, but I was hoping....

If it were, this would make collaboration much easier. And collaboration is the biggest advantage of Geni. I have not (yet) tried other collaborative sites (are there many?), but I think that while we have such a large and influential group, that we should make requests of Geni to significantly improve certain elements of the web site. Is this discussion group the right place to do so?

best,
george

George, your wish has been granted. Go to your list of collaborators (from your profile page - bottom right) and click on View All (or whatever). When the list comes up, you can see that it says Auto-Accept next to each name. Click once on that link and the words will change to Manually Review (or somesuch) and that person will now have all their requests to you automatically accepted. You will have to click the link on every collaborator, though.

Marsha, for cancelling pending merge requests, I go to Inbox, Requests, Sent, and then go to the last page, and I cancel any requests that are over 90 days old. I try to do this once a month or once every 60 days...it takes me about 5 minutes....not real automatic, but not real time-consuming, either...

Tim Stamps - "If a particular manager has been uncooperative for over a year, is there any way to appeal to the higher authorities to deal with them?"

That very much depends on what you mean by "uncooperative". If they are have not RESPONDED in over a year, and have not logged into Geni in that period, then under certain circumstances Geni will consider their profiles "abandoned" and release them.

David, I would NOT be so quick to cancel outstanding requests. Many times I've gotten responses to requests up to a year old. So I would wait about 6 months.

I'd like to second shmuel's note. I have been inactive for over a year, busy with finishing up my final project towards my B.Sc. Now that I have some more time on my hand, I have been replying to some requests that have been in my Inbox for about a year. People that are "out of the loop" don't realize most of the time that all they need to do is click once or twice. Also some people have not turned their notifications down. This causes them to consider any mail from Geni as Spam/unwanted mail. I've had this problem with my cousin who won't merge her own duplicate profile.
So to summarize I'd say; a. Be patient b. Try to contact by phone or via someone who is close.

Marsha, I guess I did not make myself clear. I thought that by putting my name here, that I was automatically accepting the request of everyone in the collaboration pool to collaborate, and that individuals did not need to ask one by one and I did not need to accept each one. I am still happy to do so. But it does bother me that Geni, whose best asset is collaboration, does not make it easier and more automatic.

Gene,
Do you mean that I should propose ideas by starting a new discussion. I do not see a forum (with a link at bottom of page).
best,
george

George, at the bottom of this (and every page on Geni), you'll see the word Forum...

Erica,
You get it exactly. It seems that the group here is making it easier for us to collaborate but that the people behind Geni do not care. Am I wrong?

Erica,
that is because this "Collaboration Pool" is entirely a user-based initiative. We used to have a much smaller "merge group", but with the recent changes to Collaboration, it made more sense to maximize the number of one's collaborators, so this group "exploded" out of that one.

George, it's NOT that they don't care. They very much do, and have listened to and acted on, quite a few user-generated suggestions, with others in the pipe-line. But what you're asking is both too specific a solution (for a relatively small group of users) AND much too dangerous! Enabling someone to automatically accept ANY request to collaborate AND any merge request, is just asking for trouble and a LOT of it.

I have 358 collaborators, and less than a dozen of them are on auto-merge. About 5-10% percent of the merge requests I get are BAD merges. If those were all automatically accepted, we'd have total mayhem, and the thousands of work-hours invested would be lost.

Discussions a b o u t the Collaboration Pool are to be found here:

http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000008814795468

Please do not discuss the pool here, in the pool itself.

Thank you, Shmuel, for pointing out again that I just did not see "forum." When I looked again, it was there. There are many interesting discussions there.

As far as them not caring, I have had so much trouble with bugs and problems in Geni that it is only the ability to collaborate that keeps me here. I think there should be a default that allows users to accept all collaboration requests (which is what I thought we wanted in the collaboration pool, accept none (because i have seen people who do not wish to collaborate, ever) or to accept requests individually as they do now. I did not say anything about merge requests.

I understand that there are bad merges and I wonder how many of these could be solved if a genealogist could see all the consequences of the merge before accepting (or making) the request.

Private User

I'm in. I'll help whenever I can.

@Dawn Sheree Houck

@ Ann. I'm in with the collaboration pool

@ Ann

@Henn Sarv
I think you forgot my name...

@Dag Thalberg

Private User

Private User