Festival access

Being in your organization and being able to work on a festival are two different things. This guide covers the second one: the panel behind a person's name, the four festival roles, and the Roles and permissions tab that describes them.

Both live on Organization settings, which only an owner or an org admin can open.

Opening the panel

Click somebody's name on the People tab, or choose Edit festival access in their row menu. The panel slides in over the list, so you do not lose your place.

Close it with the ✕, with Cancel, or by clicking the darkened background.

The panel is not part of the address. Reloading the page closes it, and you cannot send a colleague a link straight to one person's panel — send them the screen and the name.

Opening a different person discards a draft you never saved.

The top of the panel

Organization role

The same three roles as everywhere else — Owner, Org admin, Member. Owner is offered only if you are an owner. If the person already holds a role that would not otherwise be offered, it stays in the menu so the field never quietly reads as something else.

Changing it here is a draft like everything else in the panel: nothing happens until you press Save access.

Status

The current pill — Active or Suspended — and one button beside it, Suspend or Restore.

Pressing it does not act immediately: it changes the draft, and Save access commits it. What suspending and restoring actually do is described in Organization settings.

The Suspend button is greyed in two cases:

• on your own row — you cannot suspend yourself;
• on the organization's last active owner, with the reason underneath: "Transfer ownership first, an organization keeps one owner."

Owners and org admins reach every festival

Choose Owner or Org admin and the festival list is replaced — not greyed — by a note:

Org admins reach every festival The org role overrides per-festival access, so all 8 festivals and every season are open. Change the role to Member to grant access festival by festival.

That is the honest shape of it: their grants do not merely sit unused, they do not apply at all while the org role lasts. Nothing is deleted. Switch the draft back to Member before saving and the list comes back exactly as it was.

The festival list

For a Member, the panel lists the festivals they have been granted, above a line counting them: "2 of 8 festivals, 1 changed".

Add festival adds the first festival they do not already have, at Viewer, with its capability list already open. It is greyed out once they have every festival — and one person can hold one grant per festival, never two.

Somebody with nothing yet gets a dashed block instead:

No festival access yet This person can sign in and see the organization, nothing else, until a festival is added.

A festival card

Each card carries the festival's name, its current season underneath (or "No season yet"), a role menu, and a Capabilities button that opens the detail.

Some cards read "Spring 2026 · this season only". Those are grants to one season rather than to the whole festival. You can change their role, change their capabilities and remove them here — but new grants are always festival-wide; Add festival cannot make a season-only one.

Removing a festival

Remove access is inside the card's capability list: open Capabilities and it is the amber button at the bottom right. Like everything else in the panel, it takes effect when you save.

The four festival roles

A festival role is what somebody is for on that festival. Change it from the menu on the card.

Coordinator is the judging-coordinator role. Somebody who runs a season's judging — reviewing filed scorecards, chasing judges, settling screener problems — is a member of your organization with a Coordinator grant on that festival, granted here or in their invitation. There is no separate coordinator role on a season's judging panel; see Judges.

Changing a card's role clears any capabilities you had customized on it, so the role is always the baseline. That is why the pill on a changed grant says how far it has moved from the role, not from whatever it used to be.

Capabilities

Capabilities on a card opens the seven things a festival role covers, each with a tick box:

The boxes start at the role's own defaults. Tick or untick one and an indigo Added or Removed pill appears beside it, and the button that opened the list starts counting: "2 changes".

Reset to role puts every box back to that role's defaults. It is greyed while nothing differs.

On the People list, a person holding at least one changed grant shows "2 customized" under their festival count.

What the capabilities do today

Four of the seven are enforced now; the rest are still recorded. Say it plainly, because the boxes look like they should all bite:

• "Approve scorecards and resolve flags" is real. It decides who can act on the Review Queue — approving scorecards, editing a filed one, withdrawing an award recommendation, sending a rewrite reminder, and settling a screener problem a judge reported (sending the film back to them, or dismissing it). It also decides who is offered Release scorecard on a submission's Settings tab — releasing one filmmaker's scorecard ahead of the season — together with being somebody who can change the season, so a viewer given the box is not offered it; see Releasing one submission's scorecard. Festival admins and coordinators have it by default; ticking it gives it to a programmer, and unticking it takes it from a coordinator, who then gets the queue read-only. Owners and org admins always have it, whatever any grant says.

• "Manage judges and assignments" is real too, and it now covers every change to a season's judges. It decides two things:

  • Whether the two judging tabs exist for you. It gates the Judge requests and Invites sent tabs on a season's Judges screen and every action behind them. Somebody without it loses those two tabs, with the tab strip gone altogether, leaving the Roster on its own — and both tabs' addresses open the Roster for them instead.
  • Whether they can change the Roster. Inviting judges by email, resending, changing roles and scope, the FilmFreeway switch, pausing, resuming, removing and deleting a record on the Roster all need it now — and so does inviting somebody onto one of this festival's seasons from the Judges directory, whose season picker lists only the seasons whose judges you manage. This changed: the Roster used to let anyone who could change the season do all of that, programmers included. Somebody without it still sees most of the Roster's buttons and is refused when they press one — "You do not have permission to change this roster." — but the FilmFreeway switch is greyed for them.

  Festival admins and coordinators have it by default; programmers and viewers do not. Owners and org admins always have it. So ticking it for a programmer now hands them the judges screens, and unticking it for a coordinator takes them away.

• "View revenue and payouts" is real now, and it is the money one. It decides six things: whether the Revenue card appears on the Season overview, whether the scorecard-sales CSV will download, whether the Payouts section appears in a season's left navigation at all — the section holding the judge-pay ledger, where what each judge is owed is tracked and payments made outside FilmScorecard are logged, the Invoices tab where judges' invoices arrive, and the payments log (see Paying your judges, Judge invoices and The payments log) — whether the amber payout banner is drawn on the season's dashboard when the organization's payout account is not finished, and whether a submission's drawer carries its Scorecard access card, which states whether that filmmaker has unlocked their scorecard and offers the comp — see Selling scorecard access — and whether a submission's Audit tab shows its money entries: a started checkout, an unlock with its order and amount paid, a refund, and a release's price. Without it those entries are left out entirely, and out of every count. Festival admins have it by default; coordinators, programmers and viewers do not — so unticking it for a coordinator, or ticking it for a programmer, now changes what they see. Owners and org admins always have it. Somebody without it gets the overview with no Revenue card and no explanation, no Payouts row in the navigation, no payout banner, and no Scorecard access card in any submission drawer. The Payouts address, on any of its three tabs, sends them to the season's dashboard, and the download address, every pay statement, every invoice and every receipt answer "page not found".

  The banner is the one thing on that list a non-owner can only read. Its Open Payments settings button appears for organization owners and org admins only, because Organization settings refuses everybody else — so a coordinator with revenue reads the line, and is not handed a link that would answer them "page not found". Ticking this capability for somebody never gives them the payout account itself; only the owner can act on that, see Connecting payouts.

  It does not pair with Manage judges and assignments and does not nest inside it. The two are read separately and now gate different parts of the app entirely, which makes both one-sided cases ordinary: a coordinator runs the whole judging pipeline and has no Payouts section, and a board member or accountant given revenue alone gets the whole Payouts section while the Judges screen shows them the Roster with no tab strip, and refuses any change they try to make on it.

• This is the one place a Viewer's tick box genuinely changes something. Revenue is a read, so a viewer with View revenue and payouts ticked really does see the card, really can export the file, really can open the Payouts section and read the whole of it — breakdowns, statements, the payments log and receipts included — and really can read a submission's Scorecard access line and the money entries on its Audit tab. What they cannot do there is log or void a payment, or Accept, Return or Mark paid an invoice: those take somebody who can change the season, and for a viewer those controls are simply absent. That is deliberate — it is the way to give a board member or an accountant the figures and nothing else. It is the opposite of the capabilities around it, where ticking a box for a viewer gives them nothing they can use.

  The Comp scorecard access button follows the same rule. It is drawn only for somebody who can change the season, so a viewer holding revenue reads the Scorecard access line and is not offered the button — see Who can actually comp.

• Ticking a WRITE capability for a Viewer still does nothing. A viewer's changes are refused at a deeper level regardless of the box. On the judging tabs the effect is visible rather than confusing: a viewer with the box ticked can open the tabs and read everything, and every control that would change something is greyed with "You need permission to manage judges on this season." On the Roster it is not greyed: the same viewer sees the buttons live and every press is refused with "You do not have permission to change this roster." — the FilmFreeway switch is the one control drawn greyed for them. If somebody should manage judges, give them a role that writes.

• The standing coarse split is enforced everywhere, as before: a Viewer cannot change anything on that festival — not a submission, not an import, not a season, not a judge.

• "Edit festival settings and team" is enforced. It decides who can open the Settings screen and who gets Edit page on the festival's public page — and, now, who has Email submission links on a season's Submissions list, the bulk send of submitter page links. The button is shown only to people with this capability and a role that can change the season; everybody else's bulk bar simply does not have it. See Who can send them.

• The remaining tick boxes are decisions FilmScorecard stores and shows. Each capability starts biting when the screen it belongs to is rebuilt to ask — the Review Queue was the first, the judging tabs the second, revenue the third, and the Roster joined the judging tabs. One consequence worth naming: the screener link inside the Review Queue's Issue panel is not gated by "Manage submissions and imports", so anyone who can open the season can correct it there, exactly as they can on the Submissions screen.

So set them to describe what you intend. Beyond scorecard approval, the judges screens, revenue, settings and viewer-versus-not, do not rely on them to prevent anything yet.

Saving

Nothing in the panel is written until you press Save access. Until then:

• Cancel, the ✕ and a click on the background all discard the draft.
• With unsaved changes, all three ask first, with your browser's own confirmation: "You have unsaved changes on this page. Leave without saving them?" The same prompt appears if you try to leave the screen, close the tab or reload.

The footer states what a save means:

Changes take effect the next time Ada loads the festival.

Somebody working in FilmScorecard while you change their access does not see it change under them and is not signed out; their next page load has the new answer. That includes the Revenue card and the whole Payouts section: take the capability away and both are gone the next time they load, with nothing to say they went.

A refusal appears in a red block at the top of the panel and the panel stays open, with your draft intact:

On success the panel closes and the list behind it is already up to date.

Every change made here is written to the Audit log, one line per change: the role change, each festival granted or removed, and each grant whose capabilities moved.

The Roles and permissions tab

Nothing on this tab writes anything. It is the reference the rest of the screen is built on, in two cards.

Organization roles — the three org roles, each with a live count of how many people hold it and a pill reading "Reaches every festival" or "Per-festival access applies".

Festival roles — the seven capabilities down the side, the four festival roles across the top, and a tick where the role has it by default. Underneath: "7 capabilities, 4 festival roles. 3 people currently hold a customized role."

On a narrow window the grid becomes one block per capability, each listing the four roles, rather than a table you have to scroll sideways.

Read it as a description of what each role is for. What is actually enforced today is in What the capabilities do today.

Suspending somebody, and what it reaches

A suspended member reaches nothing in your organization, and that now shows up in one more place: your organization stops appearing in their account menu. Somebody who works for two organizations and is suspended from yours can still switch into the other one and will not see a row for you at all. See Working in two organizations.

What this panel cannot do

• Grant one season rather than a whole festival. Existing season-only grants are fully editable; new ones cannot be created here.
• Give one person two roles on the same festival. One grant per festival, and the role is the whole of it.
• Grant anything to somebody who is not in your organization. Invite them first — see Inviting people.
• Let somebody create a festival. Adding a festival is an owner or org admin act and no festival role reaches it — see Adding a festival.
• Let somebody manage the organization's payout account. No festival role and no capability reaches it: that is the organization owner's alone — see Connecting payouts.
• Change what a scorecard costs. The price is the platform's, the same at every festival, and no role or capability reaches it — see Selling scorecard access.

Related guides

• Organization settings — the People list, the row menu, suspending and removing, and the audit log.
• Inviting people — festival access can be chosen in the invitation, before they even accept.
• Judges — a judge is not given a festival role. Judging access is granted per season, on its own screen, by people holding "Manage judges and assignments".
• Judge requests — the first screen "Manage judges and assignments" actually gated.
• Letting submitters fix their own details — the Email submission links button "Edit festival settings and team" now gates.
• The Season overview, Paying your judges, Judge invoices, The payments log and Selling scorecard access — the screens "View revenue and payouts" gates.
• Connecting payouts — the organization's payout account, which no festival role reaches.