Festival committees have a genuine tension: you need many hands collecting, and very few hands controlling. Give everyone the same access and you lose the audit trail. Give access to one person and you have created both a bottleneck and a target.
Separate collecting from correcting
This is the whole principle, and everything else follows from it. A volunteer should be able to add a collection at the mandap. A volunteer should not be able to quietly change one that was recorded yesterday. When those two abilities are separated, the record becomes something you can rely on without having to rely on anyone’s memory.
A structure that works for most committees
Kosh ships with four roles out of the box, which map onto how societies already operate.
- Admin — the chairman or secretary: full control, including settings and roles
- Treasurer — records and manages money: collections, expenses, vendors, reports
- Collector — the volunteers: can record collections, nothing more
- Viewer — auditors, committee members, anyone who should see but not touch
Give the least access that lets someone do their job
The instinct is to make everyone an admin so nobody is blocked at 10pm during the aarti. Resist it. Blocked volunteers are a five-minute problem; an untraceable ledger is a five-year one. Start people at Collector and promote when there is a reason.