A suggestion: "Helpers"

[Tony Yarusso]

aka full-time catalysts

Over the course of this team's history, we have seen some kinds of
issues that seem consistent regardless of time and specific members.
I've noted the following:
1)  Shortage of manpower / timezone coverage and/or difficulty getting
the right numbers of people at the right times
2)  Longer-serving ops getting frustrated / angry / burnt out and
either needing a sabbatical or leaving entirely
3)  The personal difficulty of *wanting* to be a good Freenoder and
catalyze conversations that is often at odds with the knowledge that
it's so much 'easier' or 'faster' to issue a ban, particularly when
you have your hands full with multiple issues.

Furthermore, I recall noting when I first learned of Freenode's
"helper" volunteers that assisted staff with lower-level issues that
it seemed like a pretty darn good idea.  We've actually started doing
something sort of similar, having a small number of non-op individuals
that do a little bit with us, but not particularly broadly yet.

Thus, I would like to suggest that we create an official group of "IRC
helpers" who would be people that assist the Ubuntu IRC ops in various
activities, but do not have full ChanServ access rights (although
limited ones like changing the topic would likely be useful).  The
role of these people would be primarily to act as catalysts in
channels, maintain the ubottu factoid database, explain things like
how to fix vulnerability to DCC exploits to victims, offer "outside"
but more informed than usual opinions when sought by ops debating a
matter, help point out (*privately*) to an op when it appears they may
benefit from a break (short or long) to cool off, and act as a
resource for the instances where someone has a somewhat ops-related
question in a channel, whether it can be answered there or needs to be
forwarded to #ubuntu-ops, and explaining certain policies and
procedures where appropriate.  This would be an actual Launchpad group
that would recognize such contributions.

I would suggest that these people would not need to be Ubuntu Members
first, but rather that this position could be a primary way of
recognizing contributions that would qualify someone for that
recognition later (however, they should have already signed the CoC).
I would also suggest that serving as part of this group for some
period of time should be a prerequisite for becoming a full op, and
that we could then use this pool to draw from when new ops are
desired.  Ideally this group would be significantly larger than the
entire ops team (or at least the active portion), as you would expect
from a wedding-cake style layering of responsibilities.  We would then
have:  Regular users > Helpers > Ops > IRC Council.  (I'm also
starting to ponder whether it would make sense to have the IRC Council
be former ops, but not serving in that capacity while on the Council,
but that would be a discussion for a separate thread, and not
practical until we had different numbers of active folks.)

This group could also be what people go into when they decide they
need to leave or take a sabbatical from the ops team, if they still
want to be somewhat involved but not deal with the full hassles.

I think being able to delegate a lot of the more mundane and
time-consuming tasks would make the team more efficient and less
stressful to serve on.  What do the rest of you think?  If you like
the idea, what would you propose for a process of nominating and
selecting such people?

Tony Yarusso
http://tonyyarusso.com/