As mentioned at the plenary meeting on Monday, I would like to experiment with a thematic buddy system for the Exploring Members.
Without a buddy there are a bit on their own, so the idea is that we share a list with topics (Edgeryders, Nextcloud, financial stuff, …) and our phone numbers.
What you sign up for is that an Exploring Member can contact you regarding the topics that you are offering in the list, and that you can just say “sorry, bad moment, can you ask someone else” if it’s not convenient.
Could you please have a look at the document in the Onboarding folder, and fill in your name on the topics that you would be willing to buddy for?
PS: @reef-associate, I created a separate topic “impressions from an Associate Member”, because I figure people would be interested to hear from people who are relatively new about what your experiences so far. No pressure though!
Is it an idea to document all questions asked , with answers, for other/future exploring members or even associate members?
I guess some questions might come back over and over?
I am available for this.
In my opinion, this idea (discussion about “impressions from an AM”) will be in fact a “30 min online call” option because it will not be about a technical or specific question but more general. So complicated only with a 10 minutes call… and even a technical or specific question could be more lenght ^^
I think I’m more suited being a buddy in the traditional sense, for the associate membership stage. I’ll take ‘governance’ though, if no one else puts their name down for it…
The idea is just to offer them a quick point of contact, to replace the buddy that they got in the past. Just leaving them alone with the only option to contact us by email is not a great in my view: it leaves them mostly on their own, and if they send us questions, it risks leading to long email conversations that require a lot of time.
So yes, it is exactly meant to be a helpdesk for very basic questions, and I think everybody has the skills to do it. If you have special requests (calls only on appointment etc), please write these next to your contact details.
Maybe I didn’t explain it very well, but what I am trying to do indeed is to set up some sort of mini help desk to replace the buddy system during the exploring members phase.
It’s about a tenth of the commitment of being a buddy, and you don’t need to be a full member to subscribe. If you sign up to be a Nextcloud buddy for example, a question you could expect could be “where do I find the calendar?”. If you sign up for events you’ll probably be answering questions like “where do I find the address?” etc. And if for some reason you don’t have time, you just tell them that and see whether you are they can find someone else.
I find it really important that the exploring members can reach out to someone, so I’d be really grateful if more people would be willing to join. Could you please have another look at the list and see whether there are more topics that could sign up for?
