Have you noticed lately the increase in delegation of tasks by Linden Lab to residents?
Well, older residents may remember a time when Lindens and residents worked together to improve SL. In my case, being but a year old, I just have noticed now that in the past 2-3 months, encouragement to participate more and more at the "decision" level has increased.
Thus, instead of complaining about things that are not perfect with some organisations created by the Lindens, what about proposing ways of changing them?
I have often discussed that we have too many overlapping Volunteer groups, and when a group is such a scarce resource, it's rather tough to join them all (it hurt me to leave three Linden-created groups simply because I can't have enough - say, a hundred or so, at the very least
). There is really no difference between Mentors, Instructors and Greeters - they are three sides (?) of the same coin. All are Volunteer helpers, with different tasks, but at the end of the day, their tasks are about the same: helping out residents. I never agreed with the "multiple personalities" of a volunteer, and it's not unusual that I start to greet someone, bring him over to one of my classes, and afterwards reply to individual questions - so, I change groups 3 times in about an hour or so. It never made any sense to me.
Live Help is slightly different (but this is more due to the necessary "screening"
, but, in essence, they are veteran Mentors with a cool tool that allows residents to get in touch with them easily (ie. IM to Live Help). And more support material.
Basically I would just have
one group, "SL Volunteers" or "SL Resident Support Team" or something like that (I don't dislike the name "Mentor", mind you). And from the volunteer support page you would select which programs you're interested in. So, being a Greeter, for instance, should be a "status" - a "program" you're currently performing. When teaching a class instead of walking around, you'd be doing the "Instructor" program. And so on.
Back to topic, I not only agree with asking questions in the Mentor IM channel, I would like it to happen
more. I know the rules; but they haven't been set in stone - I certainly propose to change them.
Let me explain. The Greeter program is not so limiting about "spamming the Greeter channel" (there are allegedly much less Greeters than Mentors). This is used mostly to "pass" newbies around when you need to log off or do something different. It also impresses newbies a lot when you IM them and say: "I'm sorry, I must leave you know, but let me arrange you someone else to take care of you". This looks very professional. And, as a matter of fact, it's what happens with other online technical support structures, and who has done that kind of job knows what I'm talking about.
Mentors are resources of information. Yes, I always wondered why we don't get access to the "hidden LH notecards"
but I found out that the Wiki is quite good with all its material - most people simply discard it, but it has a wealth of information there. Still, for quick answers, nothing like asking one of the 300+ other experts who are accessible through an IM.
Again, since this bothers some people from what I've read on this thread, the answer is very easy. Let's ask LL for a "Mute group" facility. If you don't wish to get distracted by Q&A in the Mentor channel, just mute it, and all problems are gone. In the mean time, let the rest of the Mentors who are willing to help out with questions use the group.
Isablan is quite right - I'm also guilty of answering "sorry, I don't know that answer" sometimes. I'll stop doing that and apologise for having done it. If I know the answer, I write it; if not, I'll shut up
Simple rules like that make the IM group chat a
tool to work with during our volunteer duty, instead of making it a nuisance.
As for other abuses of the channel, the issue is so simple to deal with. You don't even need to AR abusers; just a simple email with a log record to Jeska will suffice to expel the spammer from the Mentor group. She'll be able to track down who was online at the same time and confirm that the log is accurate. There shouldn't be any warnings or "suspensions" or whatever. You know the rules; if you can't follow them, how are you supposed to be giving an example to new residents? No appeal and no pleading for not knowing the rules - if you don't know them, how did you get into the Mentor group in the first place? Etc.
I wrote to Philip to suggest some of the above, and a few ideas regarding volunteer help in SL. For instance, some Lindens (Liaisons) have recently used both the Mentor and the Greeter group to ask for help - mostly, passing newbies along when they are too busy. As you may imagine, 99% of the issues that the poor Liaisons have to deal with are probably pretty easy for us Mentors to do as well. So, it's rather awkward to "overload" the Liaisons with the simple stuff - their time is much more important to deal with abuse issues, or lost items that you need special permissions to get, or fixing land problems. But all the rest could very well be taken care of by the Mentors. What you need is a communication channel - Liaisons checking for available Mentors and directing residents to us. Get some sort of feedback mechanism (like the Greeters have) and you could even pick candidates for Live Help more easily that way.
What could the Liaisons do in their "spare time", after having dispatched all problems to Mentors? Well - assuming that they
would have spare time, of course
- they could get back to running advanced classes, like they did over a year ago. As Alexa Martini pointed out, none of us knows
all the answers. I'd welcome an in-world tutorial about how to better deal with resident's questions. Sure, I won't hide that I worked at call centres and even organized a few small support centres, and I have 12 years of experience doing email support (on several subjects), but I'm not a LL-trained employee and know next to nothing about the way they tackle with SL-specific problems. This sometimes leads to the irritating comment "you're saying this, but the Liaison I asked does it completely differently". That could be avoided by simply having a few rules and tips handed out by the Liaisons to us. I'd love to learn more about that. As I would like to learn more about things I'm absolutely clueless about - hmm, scripting particles, vehicles, weapons... or even the proper way to reparcel land in private islands without activating the bug that returns all the objects by mistake. These "Classes for Mentors" could be organised by other Mentors as well, of course.
Greeters already meet semi-regularly to discuss their experiences and after so little time they already have a semi-organised procedure established. E.g, when you get your request, write the name down on a notecard, set the date or a comment if you passed this newbie to another person, IM them explaining they're at Orientation Island but when they finish going though OI, they should contact you through IM, and in the mean time, whenever the Greeter logs on, you check everybody on your list to see if you finally get in touch with them. Almost all the Greeters do their chores in a similar way. It's a
Greeting procedure which wasn't "handed down" or "set as rules" - but "discovered" here and there by many who thought this would be the best way to deal with Greeting (since the "tools" Greeters have are definitely lacking - you just get an IM with the newbies' name, and a checkbox on the volunteer page to turn off your availability as Greeter. That's all).
The same could and should apply to the Mentor group, a far larger and older organisation. You should be able to set your status - available for questions (ie. mute/unmute the IM group), available for getting a teleport to someone needing help (ie. the Liaisons could ask only those if they're willing to help someone out
in situ), in class (ie. you're acting as an Instructor), or not available at all (in that case, you wouldn't even be able to show your Mentor title). I understand that this needs several hours of programming, and all the things needing programming, take time and valuable resources, which have to be prioritised.
But in the mean time, Mentors should also meet semi-regularly and discuss ideas, tips, and techniques. We
almost managed to organise - or should I say, the
Instructors almost managed to organise, since, sadly, it's a separate group... - a schedule for teaching classes. Fortunately, TeaZers have gone a step beyond and are pretty organised now with their regular educational classes. That's great!
It's not important that
everybody takes some free time to discuss together (we'd need some 8-10 sims for that!!) but it would be nice to have a "Mentor to Mentor event" hosted regularly, where we could exchange ideas and tips in-world, and have Jeska and perhaps one or two Liaisons attending as well, trying to answer things like: How can we work together? What does LL expects from us? Who is willing to work this way, and how can we get tools that allows us to show our willingness to participate? And so on.
Also, there are incredible support groups run by residents without any Linden supervision. I'm thinking specifically about the Mac group (but it's not the only one!), which I have joined one year ago, and I was
never spammed there. Rather the contrary - it was always a place to quickly get answers. I thought I was familiar with my Mac until I joined that group and found out how many things I simply ignored. Now I've passed on this knowledge in my role as a Mentor to other residents. Again, this could help to lower the unwanted messages in the Mentor IM group channel. Imagine that you could set up, from a Web page, your preferences - you could be a Scripting Mentor, a Textures Mentor, a Land & Economy Mentor, a Mac User Mentor, etc. by selecting appropriate checkboxes. That way, if you get a newbie with a problem in joining land parcels, you could just ask the question to the Land & Economy Mentor group - only those would get the messages and reply. This makes so much more sense to me - as said, nobody knows
everything, but, using this proposed system, you'd be able to answer
any resident question by simply filtering out the group you should ask. Liaisons do that all the time in Linden Lab, and we outnumber them 10:1 - why shouldn't we be able do the same?
We also should have standard notecards to pass along to newbies (I've written some and posted them on the wiki; and I collect many written by my fellow Mentors who I happily give away after asking them for permission). We should encourage them to attend classes and know when and where these are held. We should point them to the resources on the Web. And do it consistently as a group.
When I was very new in-world, the Mentor group was seen with awe and admiration due to its professionalism and the dedication in helping out new residents. Getting access to the wealth of knowledge that we have as a group is part of the cause for that "awe and admiration".
So, yes, I'm all for using the Mentor IM Group - and use it much more
The experience as a Greeter showed me how useful that tool can be, when used properly; I'd say, let's use "our" tool properly as well.
After all, it's all for giving residents a better SL experience
