Why does it not flag links in the opening post? Click on the position names to get a link to the description.

Deadline for cutting off discussion will be Wednesday, May 1 with a goal of going to a vote on Thursday, May 2.

Wondercafe2 Admin Team: Mendalla, Pinga, chansen

A quick note since I know this will come up:

Qualifications are not specified here but we can add them if the community thinks it necessary.

Administrators, obviously, need a good, general understanding of the Internet, the Web, and, if possible, specific knowledge of bulletin boards/forums. They don't necessarily need to be hard-core IT types (eg.  chansen isn't an IT guy, but he knows his way around a computer and the Internet and he's run boards before).

Moderators just need to be comfortable using a computer and, preferably, have spent some time on a web forum (e.g. this one). No real technical knowledge is needed since most of it is just interpreting policy and then knowing which button to click to take an action on that policy.

Treasurer likewise has no real technical qualifications, but having worked in similar positions in a churches or community groups would be preferred and basic knowledge of something like Excel would be helpful.

Mendalla

There is a lot of reading here!  Will be interesting to hear people's feedback.

Here is the timeline of the upcoming posts: http://www.wondercafe.ca/discussion/church-life/wc2-we-move-inexorably-onwards

Thanks for this.

The roles seem to be very strongly defined and I have no actual issue with anything about them.

I do see the signing officers being a bit of an issue unless this is something that can now be done electronically.  Otherwise it becomes a logistics problem and signing officers would need to live in rather close proximity to one another.

It is generally accepted practice that the signing officers also not be related to one another which makes the logistics of proximity more difficult to overcome.

For example, Pinga and I live roughly 30 minutes apart from one another.  I gather she comes to Brantford on occasion and I get to Cambridge every now and then which means we could overcome the logistics of geography with relative ease.

With that out of the way we would have to deal with the logistics of time.  Both of us would have to be free and in the same locale as the other and I don't know how easy that would be.

Anyway, as I said, I have no argument with any of the job descriptions.  I just wonder about the signing officer problem.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Revjohn, just want to be sure that I understand, by signing officers, you mean for banking?  If so, we recommended they be in GTA for specifically that reason. It is rare, even then that we would need signatures.

For anything else, I am not suree where we would need physical presence.  (Note: in banking you can get around that as well, through national banks, but..it is easier if in same region)

Note: we ran the ontario women's conference with consequiteve treasurers all across the province. That was back in the day of cheques before we could do so much electrically. The board was also distributed (intentionally) across the province.  

Hi Pinga,

Yup I was thinking primarily banking.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Since the three also sit on the board/council, we may get a better idea of whats involve if you can post the tasks it is suppose to do. thats if it is already done. If it is not and/or is something up for review than we can wait.

Alex, if you click on the words above, you get the moderator, administrator and treasurer task list.

Here are they are in link format: http://www.wondercafe.ca/blogs/wondercafe2adm/treasurer

http://www.wondercafe.ca/blogs/wondercafe2adm/administrator

http://www.wondercafe.ca/blogs/wondercafe2adm/moderator

I think that what Alex wants, Pinga, is the task list for the council.

Basically, Council is where they all sit down together to review progress on projects (upgrades, enhancements, etc.), discuss issues (e.g. user complaints, gaps in the Code of Conduct, etc.), figure out fundraising strategies, review ideas from the community for improvements, and develop proposals like the ones that the admin team have been putting forward that can then be presented to the community for discussion and approval.

Right now, the admin team is doing all that but once the Council is up and running, they will take over that role. We will be a part of it, but there will be others involved. The idea is that there really needs to be more than 3 people running this show both from a diversity standpoint and a "many hands make light work" standpoint.

We plan to present the Council model and nomination process next per the schedule in this thread (in fact, I was doing some work on it this morning):

http://www.wondercafe.ca/discussion/church-life/wc2-we-move-inexorably-o...

For now, let's look at these role descriptions. When the Council Model is "ready for primetime", it will be presented in its own thread.

Mendalla

The job descriptions look good to me.

They all look good - thanks again for all the work you are doing on our behalf!

Look good.  Some rules probably need to go along with them, but I'm guessing that comes along later.  Ie.  Can 1 mod ban a real poster, it probably helps to have the rules for posting first.

Chemgal, it was felt that the moderators should be able to discuss the code of conduct and moderation rules prior to formal acceptance, which is why they come later.

I am not sure these job descriptions need to be put up for a vote. Thye largely concern those operating the board and not the users. The rules governing actions that these people may take with users howevr should be discussed and voted on. howevr even those rules will be up for change after the new site is up, as the new site evolves.

Thanks for working to make WC2 a reality. Felt the need to reach out to the virtual church today. Glad it is still here.

Alex, we have put stuff up for vote to ensure we have consensus.   It is good to have things that are not contentious 

We have a draft Code of Conduct and mod guidelines to go with it and will be putting that draft out for discussion. However, as pinga suggests, we want the first group of mods to have input into the final draft of it. It will include guidance around appropriate sanctions that mods will be expected to follow. On other boards that I am on, a ban is generally a last resort for a real poster (e.g. if they post something illegal or repeatedly and knowingly violate the rules) with warnings and suspensions being more the norm.

Mendalla

Yes, and here's why: When an obvious sockpuppet of an already banned person shows up. We don't want to have to call a meeting to re-ban a person.

If a mistake is made, you apologize and make it right.

We're not talking about incarceration here. One of the advantages of taking over the forum ourselves is we have a lot of responsible people here who can run this place just fine while they're surfing it. Problems can get nipped in the bud before they become bigger problems. Aaron never had a chance of responding as quickly as a team of us can to a potential distraction.

If I can just issue one caveat: Problems occur when mods and admins go looking to use their moderation and admin tools. It's like a cop who goes on his beat, looking to arrest someone. All rules and verbage aside, that's the wrong approach.

lol, and once again....it is the admins who drift off topic!  

Yeah, I suck at that.

Edit: Basically, I just had a flashback this morning of a time when I had to remove moderator rights from a guy who made it his mission to go out and ban people. He flew into a rage. It was not a fun time.

Sorry for taking it off topic.

I don't knw where to post this question so here goes. Is there something in place if one or more of the Admins quit for whatever reason?

Good question, and yes, that comes up under the Council process, replacing / confirming Admin/Moderator/Treasurer.

thanks

So how do we put our names in for one of these positions? I'm very excited over the prospect of being Treasurer.

As indicated in the thread regarding timeline, we must complete steps 1, 2, & 3 prior to moving to step 4 which is " Nominations for Council positions (Moderators, Treasurer in accordance with the process created in step 2)"

You will note, it states the process is defined in step 2.  

What thread regarding timeline? "We move inexorably onward"?

Yes, Jae, in that thead, as Mendalla has pointed out earlier as well

Now, does anyone have any questions regarding the topic at hand, the position descriptions?

The job descriptions look fine to me, pinga. 

Yet again I see that our Committee of Volunteers has done a great job - this time with job descriptions.  Thank you for leading this desire of the WC members forward. I know I couldn't do it!

/It looks good to me

Thank you Pinga, much appreciated.

Are there any CRA rules surrounding online forums that the finance team should be familiar with?

Will wondercafe2 be owned by those on the Council?

Not sure about the CRA piece. We're not incorporating it at this point. I think investigating that falls under the "General financial oversight" and reporting duties of the current treasurer job description (ie. will be the responsibility of the first incumbent) but we can make it explicit if you think we should.

We have registered the software and hosting using generic Wondercafe2 administrative email addresses so it is effectively owned by whoever controls those, which will be Council. We can discuss further when the discussion of Council gets underway.

Mendalla

we fit under the club or social group category with such a small revenue.  Unless you are pulling in over 10k / year, it doesn't hit the radar.  

The treasurer role is designed to help us fit that, though, and it is why as part of the responsibility you see the "best practices" piece

Thanks for your responses and the job descriptions look good to me.  Clearly, as dcn.jae has shown us through his disgusting money grabbing hands avatar, careful consideration will have to be given in the nomination process.

It's Jae thinking he's being funny again. That's all.

to be sure I'm clear: the work of the Moderators can mostly be done while she/he is reading and participating on WC2?

Hilary, to best answer that one, I will revert to story.

In my world, I support global apps, but, most of our users are in predictable times when most of our support team also works.  So, we have been able to 90% of the time handle the calls when we are available.  We are critical resources, though, and so we have to also handle the stuff when people aren't online.

If we consider the current admin support, for wondercafe we are basically down to one person, Aaron, who is trying to handle 7x24 coverage.  He is volunteering his time now and we are lucky to have him engaged. It is one of the reasons you will see that I rarely recommend anyone doing anything other than ignoring behaviour.  

So, yes, most moderation can be done when moderators are participating in the site and when the community looks to nominate moderators they should look to best combination of moderators that covers our community, for example, east coast, west coast, global, weekends, mid-day, nighthawks, early morning, etc.....in addition to their skills.

Moderators may find they wish to assign point people in certain times where they anticipate high traffic, but realisticaly, that comes under their standard operationprinciples and will evolve as the site comes into being  and stabilizes

 admins play a part as based on how well we block will make the moderators jobs easier.

The community a plays a part as well.  Unncessary or overzealous flagging is a concern as well, 

some of this will come up under the nomination section, and some under the moderation / code of conduct

That's just to show my interest in responsibly holding the common purse. Nothing else Inukshuk, certainly not meant to offend. I do agree with you, of course, in exercising caution when nominating anyone to any role or office. Rich blessings.

To add to Pinga's comments, a key piece in moderation will be the reports queue where reports about posts, threads, spam, etc. left by users get put. The mods will likely have to work out among themselves how they are going to manage that queue and make sure items in it are being deal with on a timely basis. That isn't spelled out anywhere in the job description because it is best worked out by the mods themselves.

Beyond that, it's mostly just keeping a watchful eye on the queue and boards when you're on posting.

Mendalla

Is this where I say that the other admins are going off topic?!? I want to say that the other admins are going off topic.

Thank you both!  Everything I was reading had me scared, but that seems much more manageable than I imagined.  I hope that our community (present and future) is blessed with people who are willing and able to do each of these jobs.

Sorry chansen.  If you're blaming them... you're also blaming me...

Then I'd have to flag your post as offensive!

Are you sure you don't want to anyway? It's quite an impressive club you'd be joining.

Edit: In all seriousness, I had the test site open and I was going to go through the default moderator tools for a given post and explain them, but I seem to have locked myself out of the forum side of the site, which is closed to everyone but admins for the time being. Thing is, now it's also closed to admins! What kind of communist software is this, anyway??? I demand greater access than the proletariat!

Don't mind me, just sorting out what the hell I just did. I still have access to the admin side.

Told you I could screw this up ;)

lol, yes, I must admit that I drifted..but, it was on topic with moderator roles, so, I am going to only give myself 10 lashes

(dang, and i must say, once you have had a touch screen , working on a non-touch is  just frustrating!)

I brought it back around to the job description. Eventually. 

Mendalla

Chansen, don't tell me you have been pre-banned from the new site.

Shhhhhhh, we were trying to slip it past him!