[community] Support person

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 04:41:57PM -0400, Tommy Collison wrote:
> +Georg +Pastly +Catalyst +Steph
> 
> Also -- this grant is now due the 7th, so we have a whole extra week!

Thanks Tommy.

Georg, Pastly, Taylor, it will be really useful to get your insights
and preferences here.

Here are some thoughts to get us going:

Step zero, where do we provide support now? In Valencia I made a list:

"What are our current places for user interaction / users to get their
questions answered?"
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterDevMeeting/Notes/TakeBackCommunityChannels

Another interesting paragraph from those notes:

"Suggestion: get one person funded who will prioritize and tend the
community channels. A person that wants to help. We as the community must
help this person. They don't have to answer all the questions themselves,
so long as they create an atmosphere where people get answers. We'd pay
them to get up to speed in Tor. We need to figure out what characteristics
this person must have (technical, non-technical etc)."

A support person whose job is to "tend the community channels" is quite a
bit different than a support person whose job is to "assist in getting the
support portal up and running". Where on the spectrum do we want to be?

I think there are two priorities we should keep in mind, and they appear
to contradict each other but I argue they actually don't:

A) User support that scales is way better than user support that doesn't
scale. So, we should put high value on the websites, social media, and
stackexchange -- activities that reach a lot of people, and activities
that teach other people how to help people. And aim less for private
helpdesk responses, irc responses, mailing list responses, and other
transient non-scalable approaches.

B) Our support person is going to need to learn many things, especially
what problems people are experiencing *today*, and getting up to speed
and staying there will involve interacting with users in many different
contexts. One of the most important ways we find new bugs and usability
issues we should address is by interacting with people in the blog
comments, or talking to people on irc, or working with confused people
on trac. We need our support person to be engaged and active in these
interactive venues, with the #1 goal of learning how to help people
better, and the #2 goal of (as a nice side effect) helping people.

That is, while the focus should be on support that scales, the way to get
there is to participate in the more interactive, more transient places,
in order to know what to write in the places that reach more users.

Corollary #1: we need a person who never regards any pieces of the Tor
world as "set in stone" or "out of scope". If the person is hunting for a
workaround for a Tor Browser bug, but not involving the Tor Browser people
in the discussion "because they're busy developing", that's never going
to be best. All website text is waiting to be improved, all user support
requests should be examined to find software/documentation bugs that
can be fixed so the next user doesn't have the problem, all workflows
and support channels have inefficiencies that we can examine and discuss
and resolve. Everything can be made better.

Corollary #2: we need a support person who has enough of a technical clue
to know what's likely to be easy or hard to change, and understand how
to ask the right questions to developers, and understand their answers
and work toward a solution.

Corollary #3: we need a support person who can stay on track with the
support mission, rather than e.g. thinking the developer side is really
cool and getting bogged down trying to be a developer in all of our
projects at once.

--Roger