h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've been wondering if this is a good time to sort out some of those volunteer roles that are not already filled while we are still here together?

I know there are alot of ifs at this point, but if the community bid wins out I think there would be benefits to moving into our new place with key volunteers in place

What do you think?

Which do you mean by the key volunteers?

Good idea.

What do other people think?

I think the key volunteer roles would be

Editorial volunteers

Community Editors (we'll need a lot during a transition).

Moderators, - the role of the moderation volunteers would be to look at any yiksed post and decide if it obviously broke the house rules or not, and then forward any then that were more complex to the community editors.

Thanks for asking, peanut.

We, the key volunteers on the interim committee, fully agree that having plenty more key volunteers would give h2g2 enough keys to play the piano of volunteerism and really float this boat well enough to sail smoothly to our future home, wherever it may be. Mixing my musical and nautical metaphors.

You could have a look over in Magrathea's where people were talking about various volunteer schemes and find a volunteer task you'd like. Or did you have something in mind already?

I was thinking along the lines of the community editors, EG editors, identifying current volunteers that may like to take on tasks that the the editors do now, like the front page, talking point etc

I get lost at Magratheas, I was looking for the list that Taveron made a while back

I didn't mention mods cos I thought I'd start with the 'easier ones'

A81280974
That's the one. Not sure if really *everything* is on it.

I think we should take the existing Volunteer Schemes as our starting point, but just possibly streamline the email groups they are members of.

My vote would be for Community Volunteers who would be the Community Editors (a new role) leading a mix of ACEs and Mods, though if the Guardian Angels revived, that would be wonderful.

Editorial Volunteers would be the Guide Editors (doing what the Italics do now) supported by Scouts, Subs, the Curators, and maybe some ... er ... Super-Subs to help the Guide Editors with the heavy lifting.

I'm just riffing here, I'm not going to be in either group. (Me, I prefer to be Bad - it's a lot more fun )

If we had this structure, then it would be cool if the Post Editor was in the Community Editors / Community Volunteers group. Logically, I think the Community Artists and Photographers would be part of the Editorial Volunteers group.

But like I said - this is just my own

Thanks Taveron

I'm with you Ben, except for the mods, I think they should be seperate from the community eds and directly accountable to the IC

Anyone have any ideas about how to move forward with the filling of these roles?

Firstly there'd need to be agreement and understanding about what roles there will be, and what each of them would do. That's a prerequisite before asking people to volunteer.

So far, what I've read has been people 'riffing' on different things, to borrow Ben's phrase - throwing ideas out to play with. We'd need to make it firmer than that.

We do, but we aren't going to finally know what the roles are until we've had a chance to play with them a bit.

Of course, if we got the site, we could ask the current staff for a detailed breakdown of their roles, but we would naturally end up running things a bit differently.

We first need a group of people to do roles in the interim, other than the editorial/community split they would have to be fairly flexible and muck in where they were needed.

After a few weeks we'd be able to define the roles more fully. I think that would be a good time to be able to writer clear job descriptions. Once we had clear job descriptions we could ask people to stand for election for a longer period, I expect a lot of the first group would continue to stand, but then other people may come forward once they knew what the job involved in more detail.

(I may be tentative in how I put my opinions across, KB, that doesn't mean I hold them tentatively )

B

Based on what happened with the IC, people volunteer but then get hit by RL. That was one reason why the size of the IC really helped. If it had been "lean and mean" then we'd have evaporated.

If we are to have continuity in the Editorial Team and the Community Team, then we need to (slightly) over-staff. Think of it as being like job-sharing. That way the slack can be picked up by other members of the team, rather than causing a problem.

Ben

Oh, I never thought you did.

But there *is* going to have to be some kind of statement about what volunteer roles need to be filled. There are a lot of different visions and a lot of different opinions. I don't think it would be fair to ask people to volunteer without giving a firmer idea of what it entails than there is at the minute.

I thought there was some firming up on the community editors role on Ask but it kind of stalled

>> But there *is* going to have to be some kind of statement about what volunteer roles need to be filled.

Yep. We're working on it. I have done diagrams snd everything... [Insert standard my usual comments about how frustrating it is not to be able to share it all... they are *beautiful* diagrams].

It's really useful to have these conversations here for lots of reasons. Firstly it helps people to tussle with the concepts themselves. I learn a lot by debating things, and I know other people do too. We don't want to cut off that way for people to get their heads around the issue by saying "we've got it all worked out".

These conversations help us improve the stuff we're working on too. Without being too smug, most of the time what is said in these conversations is pretty much what we've already come up with. Where it gets interesting is where it's different. This happens for two reasons: either there is something that changes the picture a bit which we've not been able to share (Elton the ham(p)ster's not vegetarian so we can feed him bacon sarnies as well as hay) or someone's got an idea that improves what we've come up with (let's not just feed him, let's give him water to drink). When that happens we can and do sneakily include it in what we're working on and pretend it was there all the time.

So these conversations are useful for us, and useful for the people who take part in them. And hopefully we'll be able to produce "job descriptions" that are well thought through by lots of people and not just by the Interim Committee when / if (lettuce spry) the time is right.

Bit confused, you are working on volunteer roles but can't share it?

"most of the time what is said in these conversations is pretty much what we've already come up with. "

Exactly. When you hear that over and over it feels like such a waste of time trying to discuss propositions which you don't even know exist.