Link Affiliation information to Research Organization Registry (ROR)

[dwindibank]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When we try to create reports of where people come from, the affiliation data is entered very inconsistently and accurate reporting isn't really possible.

Describe the solution you'd like
Ideally the affiliation field would be a search/look-up that searches the 100k plus ROR institutions and then saves it to an ROR affiliation field, as well as updating the text in the affiliation. Some sort of option to select "other" and then put in a free text, for people who are currently not affiliated with a research organization (i.e. from industry or between positions).

Describe alternatives you've considered
Some other options considered:

• have a ROR type field for registration forms, rather then updating all affiliations, this would allow us to collect reliable enough information while allowing researchers the ability to add custom text to the affiliation field (we have examples from our registrations where the participant entered something custom like "School of X, at Institution Y" or "Organization X, and Organization Y" ... the con of this would be that participants would potentially have to enter their affiliation information twice when registering.

• Have ROR records/organizations as Look ahead Ajax hints for the affiliation field, so the participant would start entering "Harv..." and the relevant results would start to appear, the user could select them or enter something custom. The pro: would be minimal changes to the Indico, the con would be the accuracy would be as high as some other options.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[ThiefMaster]

At least for users we support predefined affiliations in the backend, there's just no UI nor a general-purpose plugin that populates the table backing it. But it sounds a lot like you care more about having this in the registration form...

And in there that's more complicated, because the regform affiliation field (currently it's just a text field) would need to support both text (as it does right now) AND choosing something from a predefined list. I think the SUI Dropdown supports this behavior (I think they call it "add new"), so having a custom "Affiliation" or "Institute" field type would be feasible (could even be done in a plugin but it's nice enough to have it in the core).

So I think the only somewhat decent way of doing it in the registration form would be to:

• create a new field type matching what I mentioned above, and possibly with some config settings on the field specifying whether it allows manually entering affiliations or not (only in case any predefined ones exist)
• leave existing regforms alone, unless this adds extra complexity elsewhere; in that case migrating them to the new field woul be preferable
• in that field, store the data in a format like {"affiliation": "CERN", "affiliation_id": 1337} when a predefined affiliation is used (the ID would reference the affiliation in the existing affiliations DB table, which could be populated from ROR or any other data source), or {"affiliation": "CERN", "affiliation_id": null} when a custom affiliation is entered

Populating the affiliations table with ROR data would be done by a plugin, because it makes no sense to ship this data in the core, and that way it would be up to each instance whether they want to use it or not.