89 lines
4.9 KiB
HTML
89 lines
4.9 KiB
HTML
<h2>Matching</h2>
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<p>The matching process for gift exchanges runs in two stages: </p>
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<dl>
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<dt>Potential Matching</dt>
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<dd>All the sign-ups are compared and for each person we generate a list of potential givers (people who can give them a gift), and potential recipients (people they can give a gift to). This is the slowest part of the process and can take as much as a day for a very large challenge or one where almost all the participants match each other.</dd>
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<dt>Assignments</dt>
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<dd>We try to give everyone a single assignment, starting with the people who have the fewest potential givers or recipients and working up until no one else can be assigned. This process is relatively fast; it generally completes within an hour.</dd>
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</dl>
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<p>You may have to decide how to fix several issues that can come up during matching.</p>
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<h3>No Potential Recipients/No Potential Givers</h3>
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<p>If someone has no potential recipients, that means no one wants what they are offering. There is no way to fix this unless the person agrees to
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offer something else that someone has requested. If they do, you can edit their sign-up and then regenerate their potential matches.</p>
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<p>If someone has no potential givers, no one has offered what they want. You can try to find a pinch hitter for them if you prefer. Otherwise,
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just as above, ask them to request something else, edit their sign-up, and then regenerate their potential matches.</p>
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<h4>Regenerating Potential Matches</h4>
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<p>Because regenerating ALL potential matches for everyone in your challenge is very slow, it is better to regenerate potential matches just for
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each individual person who has no potential matches, which will most likely only take a few minutes. Just do them one at a time, please!</p>
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<p>If you have several people with no potential matches, once you have regenerated potential matches for them, you may want to
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<strong>regenerate assignments</strong> to have the archive try to assign them along with everyone else. Note that this will very likely change the assignments for
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EVERYONE. </p>
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<h3>Assignment Issues</h3>
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<p>Once you have <em>potential</em> matches for everyone, the remaining problems will be with getting everyone assigned.</p>
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<h4>No Giver</h4>
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<p>These people could not be assigned a giver. You can shuffle the main assignments to free someone up, or you can write-in
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a volunteer. If you click in the Giver field, you'll see a list of the people who could write for each person.
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Note: the form <em>will</em> allow you to double-assign people, but remember to make sure they can write two assignments first!
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(See "Duplicate Givers" below.)
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</p>
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<h4>No Recipient</h4>
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<p>These people haven't been assigned a recipient. If you click in the Recipient field, you'll see a list of the
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people that each one could write for. You can try shuffling the completed assignments to free up one of them,
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or you can double-assign a recipient. (See "Duplicate Recipients" below.)
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The newly matched people will disappear from this section after you update.
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</p>
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<h4>Duplicate Recipients</h4>
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<p>
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You will see the duplicate recipients listing appear if you assign a person as recipient to more than one
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person. This is not necessarily a problem, they will just get more than one gift.
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</p>
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<p>
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You might deliberately want to keep duplicate recipients. Sometimes in a gift exchange, it may not be possible to get everyone
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assigned one on one. Instead of shuffling to try and match everybody, you can instead recruit a few pinch hitters for the
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people who don't have an assigned writer, and double-assign recipients for the people who don't have a request of their own.
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</p>
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<p>
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As far as the people getting the assignment are concerned, there is nothing different about getting a
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double-assigned recipient. The recipient will just have two
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givers, and assuming neither one defaults, will get two gifts instead of one.
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</p>
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<h4>Duplicate Givers</h4>
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<p>
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You will see the duplicate givers listing appear if you assign a person as giver to more than one person.
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This is not a problem as long as the assigned givers are in fact willing to get more than one assignment.
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However, for housekeeping purposes, you might only want one of these listings to be their "official" assignment.
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If so, you can delete their name from the "Giver" column and move their name into the "Write-In" field
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(in which case they will be listed on those other assignment as a pinch hitter).
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</p>
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<h4>Shuffling Assignments</h4>
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<p>Finally, even if everyone has a recipient and a giver, you may still want to shuffle assignments around in order to
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give people better matches. You can do so as much as you want. </p>
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<p>Please note that circular matches (where A is assigned to B and B is assigned to A)
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will happen sometimes randomly. You can try and reshuffle by hand if you want to avoid these.
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</p>
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