a proposal
I'd be interested in working on the demarcation and strengthening of volunteer roles. The thing is, I don't have the tech-savvy to implement some kind of easy identifier. (There are a lot of people who think "what? you can see an admin by looking for a category on their user page, or recognize a new editor by checking their contribution history". But those are not obvious. When people are in a hurry, let alone when people are new, they miss them completely.)
What's the best way to tackle it?
Cool, this is an interesting one. My suggestion would be to start with the underlying questions and not worry about the tech implementation yet. Figuring out the different roles is a prerequisite anyway, and there may be some non-tech opportunities we can take advantage of.
Surveys, like the Former Contributors Survey Results and the former administrators survey, can be part of the methodology. We learned from the former that our assumptions about recent activity aren't the best measure of whether or not someone is a former contributor. Similarly, I think our current criteria for active contributors is totally wrong. It would be great if we can start fleshing out a taxonomy of contributor types and more accurate ways of determining whether contributors fall under different categories.
If this sounds good, would you be willing to start a Task Force? I'll join, and we can recruit some others to participate as well.
We can only try :) I'd be happy to give it a shot. As for the task force, here's a few guiding principles/goals, and issues to get us started:
Principles/goals:
- The Wikimedia community is hard to navigate, and this partially has to do with cultural norms and invisible roles.
- Making roles visible should help newer editors recognize more experienced editors and vice versa.
- Recognizing volunteers in good standing can make them feel appreciated and prevent burnout.
- Decision-making should remain egalitarian and open.
Issues:
- New editors often mistaken any old warning for an official administrator notice that represents community norms.
- New editors cannot tell which users are modeling best practices and behavior.
- Experienced editors often fail to see an editor's newness, and accidentally WP:BITE the newbies. (Assuming good faith.)
- Collaboration is difficult without trust. Editors with positive history will be more collaborative than complete strangers.
(Just my first shot.)
This is a great first shot. Do you want to start a task force and articulate these principles there? We can call it the Volunteer Task Force or something similar. I'll jump in there.
Starting a task force is a good idea. Not sure what I'd need to do there beyond just making one page. It should probably have a more well-defined scope than just volunteers in general, otherwise it's likely to retread over the same themes as the community health task force. I'd rather spend more time trying to get to the implementation of an idea than to spend another few months discussing ideas. I think that's what Wikimedia needs now.
The theory behind the current structure is that, if there's a concrete idea, someone should write it up as a Proposal, and people can self-organize around that. If some thinking among multiple people is necessary to generate a Proposal or other useful documents -- a statement of principles, for example -- than those people should create a Task Force, and these documents should be articulated as deliverables.
In this case, you've already written a concrete proposal about how to start doing this work. So maybe we should start there? If yes, then I've already signed up on that proposal, and I'm willing to go with it. Please be patient with me, though. Lots of discussion going on right now around the Strategic Plan that I need to participate in over the next few weeks. (Hope you can help with that too.)