Quilt Crew

2027 Ocean Waves Quilt Show

Please try to break it

Quilt Crew is the sign-up sheet we will use for the show. Before four hundred volunteers meet it, a few of us are going to. This is the volunteer’s side of it — the part everybody sees.

Starts Thursday 24 September

Before you start

  • The link — it comes with the email that sent you this.
  • Your own real email address, not a made-up one. Half of what we are testing is whether the email arrives.
  • About fifteen minutes, and a phone if you have one.

Nothing you do here matters. It is a practice sheet — sign up for anything, cancel it, sign up again. You are not committing to a shift.

The single most useful thing you can tell us

When the confirmation email arrives, tell us which folder it landed in — Inbox, Junk, Spam, Promotions — and who provides your email: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Comcast, your internet company.

One tester found it in Junk. We have changed things since, and we have no way of knowing whether it worked without a spread of real addresses. All of you, on as many different providers as we can muster, is exactly the test we cannot run ourselves.

What to do

  1. 1

    Open the link and just read it

    Before signing up for anything. Could a volunteer who has never helped before tell what the jobs are and what they involve?

    Tell usAnything you had to read twice. Job names that mean nothing unless you already know. Times that are ambiguous.
  2. 2

    Sign up for one shift

    Pick a time, put in your name and your real email address, submit.

    Should happenA confirmation on screen listing what you took, with a cancel link for each one.
  3. 3

    Go and look at your email

    Then come back and note the folder and the provider, as above. Check Junk even if it is in your Inbox — sometimes a copy is in both.

    Tell usThe folder, the provider, and roughly how long it took to arrive. If nothing arrives at all, say so — that is a result too.
  4. 4

    Sign up for several things at once, across different groups

    Go back to the sheet. Tick something in one group — Admissions, say — then switch to another group, Kitchen or Set-up, and tick something there too before you submit.

    Should happenEverything you ticked is on the confirmation. This one had a bug where switching groups quietly dropped your earlier ticks, so it is worth doing deliberately.
  5. 5

    Try to be in two places at once

    Find two different jobs running at the same time on the same day, and try to take both.

    Should happenIt stops you and says why. Back-to-back shifts — one ending at 11, the next starting at 11 — should be allowed.
  6. 6

    Cancel one of them

    Use a cancel link from your email, not the one on screen.

    Should happenIt asks whether you are sure before anything happens — opening the link on its own must never cancel it outright. If you signed up for more than one time, it should also name the others, before you confirm and again afterwards, so you never have to press a second link to find out whether the first one worked.
  7. 7

    Pretend you lost the email

    At the bottom of the sheet there is Lost your cancel link? Put your address in.

    Should happenYour links arrive again. Note the folder for this one too.
  8. 8

    Hand the device to somebody else

    Only if you can — a spouse, a friend, anyone. This one comes in two halves, and you do not need to close anything or reopen any links.

    First, hand the device over exactly as it is, without pressing anything, and let them look at the sheet.

    Should happenYour name and your cancel links are still there. That is expected — it is the reason the second half exists. Tell us whether it is obvious to them that they are looking at somebody else’s sign-ups rather than a blank form.

    Then press Clear this and hand it to the next person and look again.

    Should happenEverything of yours has gone and they get a clean sheet to fill in. If anything of yours survives that, tell us straight away.
  9. 9

    Swap devices

    If you did all that on a computer, open the sheet on your phone. If you did it on a phone, open it on a computer.

    Tell usAnything too small to tap, text running off the side, or a button you could not reach.

Telling us what happened

Either reply to the email that sent you this, or write straight to Howard at howard.ignatius@gmail.com — he is the one making the changes, and going direct means nothing is lost in the retelling. Both are fine.

Even “did it all, worked fine, email went to Inbox, Gmail” is worth sending. We need the successes as much as the failures — a folder we never hear about is a folder we cannot count.

If something went wrong, the useful things to include are:

  • What you were trying to do
  • What you expected
  • What happened instead
  • Phone or computer, and which browser if you know
  • A screenshot if you can manage one — a photo of the screen is fine

Already known — no need to report

There is a separate plan for the coordinator.
Building and editing the sheet is her side of it, and a different page. Nothing here asks you to create anything.
Group chairs cannot have their own logins yet.
You can see and use the sheet as a volunteer, but there is no account that shows you just your own group. That is being decided now, and it is the next thing to be built.
Everyone's name is visible on the sheet.
You can see who has signed up for what. That is deliberate, the same as a clipboard on a table at the guild hall.

Quilt Crew — the sign-up sheet for the 2027 Ocean Waves Quilt Show. Every problem found now is one that four hundred volunteers do not meet in March.