• SeteshStrong
• CommunityHelperStrategy2024

Summary

With the transition of the Helper Program into phase 3 and the onboarding of teams for each of our primary roles, Community Helpers, Newcomer Helpers, and Event Helpers, we have decided to update our mid-term strategic approaches. This will be conducted through a collaborative effort with each respective team, and will progress through several steps:

1. Goal Mapping
2. Future State (Gap) Analysis
3. Bullseye User Canvas
4. User Profile Canvas
5. User Attribute Grid
6. Touchpoint Mapping
7. Journey Mapping
8. 4-Corners Canvas
9. Metrics Audit

Goal Mapping

Deadline: extended to Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

Participating Team Members:

Summary

Goal mapping is a three phase process. First each team member generates a list of 3 to 5 goals that represent successful outcomes for the Community Helper team. These goals can range from project level, server level, team level, or personal level goals. Techniques like 5-whys and Ishikawa diagrams to analyze perceived challenges, and then formulating goals to achieve that may overcome those challenges, can be used to help generate goal lists. These goal lists are then brought together, and the team collaborates to categorize them into a set of 5 or fewer similar themes that are shared between them. When this is finished, the team collaboratively determines the ordering of those categories according to their priority in achieving success.

Team Member Goal Lists

@samuelvenable

1. Be able to discern better when (and how often/much) to discuss with other staff how to deal with situations before taking direct action. If we overdo this it could defeat the purpose of why we are staff members who moderate because we need to make decisions or take action on our own sometimes, which leads to my next bullet point.
2. Be able to discern better when and how often/much to take action on our own without consulting other staff members, we don't want to bother each other by being too excessive but also need make sure we don't overdo this either otherwise we might make decisions other staff members might not approve of.
3. Discern better when to warn someone or a group of individuals of one or more ban, kick, timeout, or channel slow mode without getting a second opinion on it first. Understand the rules of the server good enough to know where to draw the line with certain things to make this call on our own.
4. Understand better where to be more gracious with people and give second chances.

@z0idburg

1. Chatty users are also contributors. Why do people join the FreeBSD Discord server? It's more likely than not because they are somehow affiliated or want to be affiliated with something related to FreeBSD. Whether that be learning about BSD, finding other people who -also- use BSD, etc. Everyone joins for a reason, even if it's just because somebody invited them to join for fun. Therefore, it is important to note that someone joining only for the reason to SPAM is an unlikely percentage of our newcomers. We should try to find ways not just to engage our chatty members, but additionally to make the community engaging for them. If the community is not engaging, then people get bored. They stop looking at chat, they find other places to chat, and they leave.
2. We should be populaing pins more often. Pinned messages are crucial for providing bookmarks to important links and other resources for learning and getting help. I advise you to go into several channels and "count" them right now 🙂

3. Should we interconnect our chat systems? While the FreeBSD IRC is a fairly different ecosystem and I am sure that some may be less apt to side with this, I wonder if we should be reaching out to the FreeBSD IRC moderators and propose forming an IRC <-> Discord bridge like many servers that originally started on IRC are already doing. This also allows for those who live in countries where Discord or IRC is less accessible to use one or the other. A project like this would have many complications such as moderator management and other issues, but something like this may be worth it, even if it means having our own IRC channel just for the bridge, such as #freebsd-discord.

@setesh.strong

1. Successfully retain as many members, both new and old, who come to the server as we can
2. Create an environment that makes members feel engaged, included, and safe enough to express themselves honestly, within the boundaries of the ToS (Discord Terms of Service) and CoC (FreeBSD Code of Conduct).
3. We want our members to form real, personal, emotionally significant ties to our community that inspire them to make a personal impact on its future, and care about their fellow members, and the growth of our shared home.
4. Create a server community culture that our members perceive as both operationally transparent (community maximally involved in decision-making), and minimally classist (not by rejecting community roles entirely, but by removing barriers to achieving entry for anyone who pursues them)
5. Incentivize personal ownership, meaningful results, and sustainable approaches.

@fvla

1. Slightly more careful and proactive moderation (we need more soft punishments on repeat offenders, particularly mutes after repeated warnings over poor embed usage)

2. Gently nudging new members toward Learn & Contribute channels earlier than later (consider possibly even "let's take this conversation over to <#831066226074976267>, shall we?")

3. Keeping the "color" of the environment (including in <#727023752348434436>) to be one where anyone feels comfortable walking in and either reading or adding to the conversation.

   1. Low moderation (the current state) makes it easy for a couple immature people to make the environment unappealing for more mature members to interact with.
   2. Excessively high moderation will, of course, make it less inviting for the maturing group of users to chat with all of us. So we need to make boundaries very clear and still take a fairly minimalistic approach to moderation, adding just a few cases like I described in #1.
   3. I highly recommend that members and moderators alike confront people the way one might in real life, but with professionalism, to tell people things like: "What you said just now really isn't cool. I'd really appreciate if you could put more consideration before saying something that offensive."
4. Abolishing class boundaries except for necessary forceful actions (such as banning the intentionally toxic or muting the immature repeat offender) has been discussed already.
   1. What this means to me in practice is primarily that we should all aim to interact with members enough as members ourselves, and set the standard for our server by example, including by letting people know what's on our minds when we read a message which upsets multiple people.

@gh0st6958

1. I feel that politics (American, to be precise) is so divided and inflammatory, that it should be kept down low for the time being.
2. We need a clear status goal for newbs. How can we help them prepare for working with @mentors?
3. Otherwise, I think it goes really well, we seem to have a great connection, and the newbs neems to come back, at least some of them.

@wolfquin

1. make helper program more transparent and visible to the community
2. moderation rules
3. rounds up every now and then (2 months)

@use_freebsd

1. I would like to see improvement in how we deal with spammy content (including me) (blocks of memes, sometimes repetitive ones, random meme youtube links, completely out of the context of the moment), we shouldn’t ban it, but we should discourage it and/or allow it when done tastefully or something. As much as this will make it slightly harder for newcomers, newcomers require people already in the server (sometimes people who have been on the server for a few years) to get an understanding on what is good or bad on the server and just the general culture of the server, this change will make older users welcome more these newcomers, because it means they are putting effort
2. I’m seeing more people discourage debating, which I think shouldn’t be discouraged, In my experience, I learnt a lot about BSD because I argued, even if sometimes I was completely uneducated about it and was mostly what i thought. As long as people can respect each other and learn from it. I think it shouldn’t be discouraged.

Proposed and Selected Thematic Categories

@setesh.strong

1. Facilitating member skill-ups to prepare working with @mentors. [Note that this is something that may require coordination with @organizers on the Event Helper team]
2. Identifying and analyzing behavioral and cultural challenges of the community, and their root causes.
3. Ensure inclusiveness for all member personas, and defying class barriers by encouraging social status and appreciation for all forms of contribution, not merely source.
4. Clearly defined playbook for common moderation scenarios, and behavioral expectations of moderation team members
5. Clearly defined communication methodology and processes for community helper team members to discuss, plan, and coordinate.

Finalized Category Prioritization

Notes and Comments

Future State Analysis

(TBC)