User Feedback?

[ChrisDickersinProkopp]

When you demo'd the tool to us at DHCD today you mentioned you were exploring ways for users to provide feedback. An example of instance where that could be useful: I was searching projects and filtered the list down to the three largest projects. I noticed the Wingate Apartments among the largest. The Wingate Apartments was foreclosed on several years ago, and unfortunately affordability covenants do not survive foreclosure. So the affordability restriction ended suddenly.

This is an uncommon situation, but more than a few projects have similar nuances. Certain users (DHCD staff, housing counselors, etc.) may have this anecdotal knowledge and it would be great if there were a simple way to report these issues. For DHCD folks, we can modify our own Quickbase data but it seems like a limited number of fields are pulled from that database. Subsidy end date, for example, comes from the Preservation Catalog (right?).

Let me know if this isn't the right forum to post issues like this, I can email them instead or go another route. Anyways, great tool and I/we are really excited to take advantage of it. Thank you for all your work.

[NealHumphrey]

@ChrisDickersinProkopp Thanks for feedback! First, yes absolutely this is the best place to provide feedback - that way all the team members can see it, and we won't lose track of it.

RE: this specific issue, currently we are taking the provided data as-is from relevant sources. As you've identified we are not yet integrating many of the fields from Quickbase - mostly what we get right now from Quickbase is just the existence of a project.

• Determine a way for users to easily provide feedback on specific projects ("Report an issue" button?)
• Do a first-pass over the data with @ChrisDickersinProkopp, @ptatian and others, and make a list of similar nuanced issues
• Especially figure out how to better mark projects as inactive
• Determine how best to fix the majority of these issues - providing a "patch" of override data, getting upstream data providers to change their data, provide better feedback loops for re-calculating fields provided by the PresCat (e.g. recalculate the subsidy end date in this example)

A related issue is that there are defiitely some additional integration steps that are needed to get the DHCD data and PresCat to be better integrated. I just want to flag this for you as we definitely know there is more to be done on this, so you'll likely see plenty more issues. Don't hesitate to report them here as you see them, but I think sitting down with you to do a once over will be important. Also, note that there is one big outstanding bug that I plan to fix before the 5th that is causing there to be a large number of duplicate records when we fail to find that a DHCD project is already in the PresCat - that issue is #583

[ptatian]

@NealHumphrey Just to confirm, issue #583 is dealing with the situation where records from DHCD Quickbase are showing up in the subsidy info for projects already in the Catalog? For example, Tyler House. In this case, I think it would be better to omit the Quickbase entry, since it's not adding any information.

As a separate issue, I noticed that many of the project page subsidy entries say, "Some subsidies have missing information, so this chart cannot be displayed." What information is necessary for the chart to be shown? We might want to adjust the criteria because it seems the chart is rarely being displayed.