Parks Manager

Crew boards

Crew boards in Parks Manager are a shared planning space for up to eight people, with three roles: owner, member, and onlooker.

Your personal board and each crew board are separate. Trips, scratch maps, and alerts belong to one board, and you choose which when you create them.

Three roles, one of which exists for grandparents

Onlooker is the role most shared planners skip, and it is the one people ask for. Somebody wants to follow the plan without being able to delete a day of it, and read-only is the honest answer to that.

A write attempted by an onlooker is refused with an error rather than accepted and silently dropped, so nobody spends an evening editing a trip that was never saving.

What each crew role can do
RoleCan do
OwnerEverything a member can, plus invite and cancel invites, rename the crew, change a member’s role, set the merge policy, and transfer ownership.
MemberEdit everything shared: trips, the scratch map, pack lists, alerts, emergency contacts, and check-ins.
OnlookerRead the board. Every write is refused.

Invites

The owner invites by email address and Parks Manager sends a link. The link is good for 14 days, and membership is created when it is accepted rather than when it is sent — an unaccepted invite is not a member.

Pending invites still count against the eight-person cap, so a crew cannot be oversubscribed by sending nine invitations and hoping. New joiners land as members; the owner can move anyone to onlooker afterwards.

Personal and crew boards stay apart

Every trip is scoped to exactly one board, and the scratch map keeps separate records for personal and crew. A trip you are still thinking about does not appear on a shared board until you put it there.

You can belong to more than one crew. A trip with old university friends and a trip with your parents are different boards, with different people and different roles.

Two people edited the same trip

Shared planning documents usually resolve this with last write wins, which quietly discards somebody’s evening. Parks Manager proposes a merge instead: a field-by-field diff of the two versions that the crew can look at before anything is applied.

The merge policy decides what it takes to apply one. Whatever the policy, a merge that has been applied can still be reverted, and every merge carries a status of pending, applied, rejected, cancelled, or reverted.

Merge policies
PolicyWhat it takes to apply a merge
OpenApplies immediately. Sensible for a crew of one.
PeerOne approval from somebody other than the person who proposed it.
MajorityMore than half the crew approves, counting the proposer as an approval. This is the default.

Comparing what each of you has seen

A crew can compare visited parks: which parks each person has scratched, which the whole crew shares, and which years those visits happened. It reads the personal boards of the crew members rather than the shared one.

It deliberately returns no trip titles. Comparing where two people have been should not leak what either of them called a trip.

What it does not do

The sharing model is coarse on purpose.

Common questions

How many people can share a Parks Manager board?

Eight, including invitations that have been sent but not yet accepted.

Can somebody follow a trip without being able to change it?

Yes. The onlooker role reads the whole board and is refused on every write, which suits family members who want the plan without the ability to edit it.

What happens when two people edit the same trip in Parks Manager?

Neither version is silently discarded. One person proposes a merge, the crew sees a field-by-field diff, and the crew merge policy decides how many approvals it takes to apply.

How long does a Parks Manager crew invite last?

Fourteen days from when it is sent. After that the link stops working and the owner sends a new one.