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 <<a href="mailto:tonyyarusso@gmail.com">tonyyarusso@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">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 <a href="http://tonyyarusso.com/" target="_blank">http://tonyyarusso.com/</a> -- Ubuntu-irc mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-irc@lists.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu-irc@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-irc" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-irc</a> </blockquote></div>