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Facilitators — field coordination

Real collection campaigns don't recruit contributors one by one from a website — they run through on-the-ground coordinators: the teacher who brings twenty students, the community organizer who onboards a village. Payment flows through those coordinators too. Platforms that can't represent this force campaigns back into spreadsheets.

AfriAnnotate models it directly, with deliberately narrow powers. The field-coordinator model is studied from Leyu, and it's a platform-wide capability — it works for any project type (speech, sign language, image, text), not just one kind of campaign.

What a facilitator is​

A facilitator is a project contributor with exactly two extra abilities — appointed by a project manager, never self-declared:

  1. An attributed invite link. Everyone who joins through it is recorded as that facilitator's recruit.
  2. A cohort view. Their own recruits' progress and earnings — nobody else's.

A facilitator can not edit project configuration, manage the roster, see other cohorts, or touch anything else management-shaped. Demoting one is one click and immediately deactivates their invite link (posters in the field stop attributing — they don't silently keep working for a removed coordinator; re-appointment reactivates the same link, so printed QR posters survive).

Appointing​

Project Settings → Members → Contributors → Make facilitator on any active contributor. A badge marks facilitators in the roster.

Facilitators (and managers) get their link from the Facilitator panel on the project dashboard — one click copies it. The link:

  • resolves to the project's join flow with the project's consent requirements intact — attribution never bypasses consent;
  • attributes first-touch: an existing contributor's recruiter is never overwritten by a later link;
  • ignores self-recruitment;
  • and fails soft: a dead or foreign link still joins the person — just unattributed. The link is attribution, never access control.
  • One link per facilitator per project. The first click on Copy my invite link creates it (a random token, /discover?invite=<token>); later clicks return the same link. The link is copied to the clipboard and shown on the card for manual copying. QR code opens the same link as a black-on-white code with the URL beneath — print it for in-person drives; participants scan instead of typing. Managers get their own attributed link the same way.
  • Opening the link (the person must be signed in) resolves the token and opens the join modal for that project — consent requirements included — with the token attached. Someone already on the project just sees the normal Discover page.
  • Stamping. When the join goes through, the server records the facilitator as the recruit's recruiter only if the token is active, belongs to this project, and isn't the joiner's own. Attribution is first-touch: a contributor who already has a recruiter keeps it. An unknown or deactivated token is ignored — the join still happens, unattributed.
  • Tokens never expire. Demoting the facilitator deactivates the link (resolving it then fails and joins through it stop attributing); re-appointing reactivates the same token, so printed posters keep working. Demoting a facilitator never deletes their recruits, and the recruits stay attributed to them.

Cohort rollups​

  • Facilitators see their own cohort on the project dashboard: each recruit, join date, validated units, and — where the project's rate card is visible — owner-declared amounts.
  • Managers see every cohort, grouped per facilitator with totals — each group headed Name, N recruits, total amount, largest cohort first; recruits are listed oldest join first, 10 / 25 / 50 per page. Amounts and totals appear only when the rate card is visible to contributors or the viewer manages the project. A manager sees the card even before any facilitator is appointed (No recruits yet — share your invite link…), so the feature is discoverable; a plain contributor never does.
  • The payout CSV carries a facilitator column, and the ledger can group by facilitator — because handing each coordinator their cohort's payout sheet is how field payment actually flows.

Privacy notes​

Cohort attribution is visible to the facilitator (who recruited the person) and project managers — it appears nowhere public. Leaderboards remain opt-in regardless of how someone joined.