User:Sphilbrick/Permissions process improvement

OTRS Permissions

At a very high level, (and with apologies to Sergio Leone) I can categorize Permissions Tickets into three groups:

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Good is clear enough - the person sending in the permission statement is the copyright holder, has filled out a clear statement, with links to the image (or text) and there are no red flags. Any agent can process in a minute or two.

Ugly is also obvious, and painful. Red flags galore, the person is using a hotmail email address, the image looks historical or professional, the person providing permission doesn't quite sound right, missing EXIF, yet it is claimed to be a photo, not a scan, I could go on and on. This group isn't the subject of this email. We've always had the ugly, we'll always have the ugly, and that's what we get the big bucks to process.

Now that we have that out of the way, I'm interested in addressing the bad.

These are tickets that should be in the "good" category, but aren't, because the person writing didn't quite know what to do. They are the copyright holder, they are willing to license it appropriately, but they had never heard of a creative commons license before, and don't quite know what to do.

We get through all of these, but they take time and back and forth. Sometimes it is a bespoke permission statement, and we have to decide whether to accept it, or ask for a better statement. Sometimes it is a reference to a file that is attached, but not the image that has been uploaded, so we have to find it. Or perhaps they (understandably) think they need to get permission before uploading, so we search for the image, and then have to ask.

If they had clear instructions from the beginning, we might be able to convert most of the "bad" into the "good" That won't eliminate the "ugly" but it could cut down on the work we need to do, and the work done by the person who is trying to donate something and we are jumping them through hoops.

I thought I was going to have to do some detective work to figure out how our customers find the email address. I thought we might have it in multiple locations (we probably do) and I thought that the instructions at one or more of those places could use some tweaking. However, in a conversation with another agent, who was helping me clean up the Photo submissions backlog, he believes that the primary contact point is the {{npd}} template placed on many images. I think that makes sense, and my next step is to propose how we might change that template.

My challenge is the solution I'd like to propose is beyond my technical skills, so I hope to get some buy-in, then we can push to identify the right resources.

Choices

First, a brief side discussion about choices. For many years, I was a fan of choices. More choices means, well more choices. If I am presenting which a choice between A and B, I have to choose A or B. If you now tell me I can choose between A, B, and C, I can still choose A or B, but I also have the option of choosing C. I would have argued, I did argue it was a Pareto Improvement, with possible gain, with no loss.

Some number of years ago, a colleague persuaded me my thinking was flawed. It came up in the context of auto warranty options, which is incredibly boring, even for those in the business, so I won't belabor the specific example. However, he persuaded me that too many choice can lead to paralysis, not exactly the same as Analysis paralysis, but close enough. The Fox and the Cat (fable) which I had never read before today, illustrates the problem.

Back to OTRS

We perpetuate the problem when we offer copyright holders a choice of literally hundreds of licenses. While I was happy with the help I got rewriting the boilerplate [[1]], I'm left with a concern that many people just want to donate their image, and choosing from the list is more than they wanted to do.

Part of me wants to be more ruthless and tell them to use the cc-by-sa-3.0 license and be done with it. I can't quite go that far, but what I would like to do is to tell them that there is an easy way to select the license deemed best by most, and if they want to look at other options they can.

So I'd like to model a template similar to the Commons Upload Wizard, or the File Upload Wizard but with options to complete a permissions statement. I envision it something like the following:

If you want to contribute an image to Commons, you have to be willing to provide a free license. Most people providing an image are happy with the cc-by-sa-3.0 license. If you are the sole copyright holder, and wish to use this license, click here, and we will create a permissions statement for you, which you can read to make sure you are comfortable with the terms.

If you want to consider other license options, please see this page (link to tags) and, if possible, use the email template for a permissions statement.

Most will be willing to accept our suggestion. If you click on the link, it asks you to fill in a name, fill in an email address, fill in a link to the image, and choose from a drop down box with two options: 1. Copyright holder and 2. Authorized representative of copyright holder.

Then it creates a filled out form, they read it, and click send, and it delivers it to the right address, now in the Good category.

I don't have the technical expertise to deal with what happens when you click, but I would model something along the lines of the Commons Upload Wizard.