You cut the turf on Thursday. On Saturday morning fourteen people want to know which streets are theirs, and every one of them is asking the same person.
What goes wrong
Turf goes out by text message, one canvasser at a time, and the person cutting it cannot also be knocking. At 8am on a Saturday that is the slowest part of the day.
A shared spreadsheet has no locking. Two canvassers open it, both see Maple St unclaimed, both write their name in, and one of them wastes a morning on doors that were already knocked.
A volunteer who showed up because a friend asked them to is not going to create a login, confirm an email and learn an interface before they will take a street.
What the list looks like
Ward 3 canvass — Saturday
One item per line, pasted from wherever you keep them. That paste is the entire setup — there is no project to configure.
How it runs
The same link works for everyone on the canvass. Nobody is added, invited or provisioned, and a volunteer who turns up an hour late takes whatever is still open.
The moment somebody takes Maple St 400–430 it disappears from everyone else's list. That is enforced in the database, not by everyone being careful.
One bar, visible to the whole canvass. A turf list at 80% pulls the stragglers in; a list stuck at 0% tells you which precinct needs a phone call.
Somebody takes four blocks and their car dies. They put the streets back themselves, or you release them from the organizer link in one click.
Yes. Every taken item carries the name of whoever took it, and the activity log shows the order it happened in. That is usually what settles "I thought I had Church St".
No. It sits next to it. Your walk lists still come out of whatever cuts turf; this is only the step where the turf gets handed to people, which is the step that usually happens over text message.
Same shape — an item is a slice of the call list rather than a slice of the street. Mixing door turf and phone lists on one board is fine and fairly common, since the people who cannot walk take the phone items.
There is a cap on how much a person can hold at once, set to three by default. Finished turf does not count against it, so somebody who is actually knocking is never blocked.
Close to this
Route 1 — Church to Battery, 22 poles
Registration desk — Sat 08:00–10:00
Grocery run — Eastside, 4 households
Seven jobs, one shape
You get two links: one to share, one to run it with. No email, no account, nothing to confirm. How it works.