So it’s been a year, so I wanted to bump this. #Support is one thing that makes RP unique, and the protocol would not be nearly as used if not for the relentless efforts of the many people who participate in #support. I don’t think we are much farther along on automating portions, and obviously the docs are an ongoing and large project.
I wanted to see if there was appetite to trying some experiments on reimbursing the support volunteers in an ongoing fashion? I think even if it’s inefficient at first, by iteration hopefully we can get to a decently reimbursed volunteer crew; above all, I’d like to avoid a round of discussion where everyone agrees it should happen but no agreement is reached.
I’ll throw out-
1). Recurrent Retrospective award with a monthly pot of 10k usd
2). Use @haloooloolo s script to calculate the hours spent (under newly chosen criteria)
3). Someone from GMC goes through the top 10 entries; weeds put any people who are mostly requiring support, until 10 true non-bot ‘supporters’ are found.
4). Take a sampling in some way (eg take 10 messages starting at the same moment in time: 1, 11, 21, 31… in #support). Any person with <80% messages directed towards people seeking support (“you’re welcome” would count but !dance would not) is removed for that month.
5) monthly award is split amongst the remaining ‘supporters’ based on hours calculated
Benefits:
low overhead, likely around 30 minutes per month to administer
Neutral
Non-reliant on self reporting
Easily iterative, as the pull criteria from the script can change
Downsides:
Doesn’t entirely remove the benefit of spamming extra messages to increase billed time, although gives it a risk factor.
May take some ‘fun’ out of support since an overabundance of !dance messages may disqualify. We could mitigate by allowing certain messages to be ignored by the script and GMC checks.
By random chance, some ‘supporters’ will inevitably be disqualified erroneously some months, and others may be erroneously paid. However, because these errors simply result in your share being redirected to other ‘supporters’, it should even out over time and is better than status quo.
This is not “what our support crew is worth,” but is more a thank you and recognition for their work.
This does not reimburse low frequency but consistent contributors (I think this is ok for now, as I am going for ‘start with something’).
other thoughts:
‘Supporters’ will have responsibility to self police if there is someone who is frequently using support for non-supportive messages, or is not a knowledgeable/effective supporter.
Would be easier (but not required) if the monthly payment went out to one trusted community member who divided it up as specified by GMC. Or to a non-trusted community member who paid out and then was reimbursed by the GMC.
I don’t think this should be seen as an alternative to long-term structural changes to the ad hoc nature of #support.
I was planning to post this after ethdever wrapped up, and I see haloooloolo posted a retroactive; I don’t think they really interfere with each other