A suggestion: "Helpers"

[G. Chiazzese]

I like Tony's suggestions about "irc helpers". I don't want to be
presumptuous but would like to nominate myself to be a "irc helper".

IdleOne
G.Chiazzese

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Tony Yarusso <tonyyarusso at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/
>
> --
> Ubuntu-irc mailing list
> Ubuntu-irc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-irc
>
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