Hey all. During the recent Fauna and Pollen meetings we have discussed the support roles, how they help the community and how we as a community can support them in return.
This is the current situation:
- There is no fixed support role. All Faunas, some Seeds and many others help out new-bees in many ways. Often in the #Help channel on Discord and here on the forum #support channel.
- The only way the community supports these helpful individuals is through the #pollen project, where positive emojis/reacts create āpollenā, which will turn into HNY.
- The Help channel is āboostedā for this pollen program, which means that emojis here count more than those given elsewhere.
The problems with the current situation are:
- New-bees normally are not aware of the Pollen program, often their request for help is the first time in the Discord. Therefore it is quite rare that someone who has been helped tremendously -sometimes pages worth of effort- actually leaves a ācred-mintingā emoji.
- Support is given not only in the #help channel. There are currently also Spanish and French help channels, but still, a considerable amount of questions are asked in Direct Messages, and in nearly all other channels. We always try to point everyone to the #help channel instead, but often it is faster to just fix the problem at hand.
- Boosting the help channel doesnāt boost the help given in other channels, it doesnāt help any contributors that assist but that are not given any emojis in return and unfortunately boosting any channel is a clear way to manipulation/gaming.
So what should we do instead?
So we must think about how to move forward. The part of the community that helps others is vital for the entire Hive. If new-bees canāt figure out what to do and nobody helps them, they will leave to never return. On the other hand, many of those that spend many hours helping others do want some form of recognition and if needed some form of payment for their efforts.
There are some temporary solutions and more ideas were shared in the discussions:
- The channel boost mentioned above.
- Some have proposed to regularly check the help channels and ārewardā all discussions that went unrewarded by giving emojis afterwards. I have noticed some helper-bees actively doing this already.
The issue with these 2 options is that it incentivizes abuse/gaming and could cross the line between good intentions and unwanted behaviour easily, while maybe missing those that do hard work elsewhere.
These options seemed to be fairer:
- Using the Tip-bot to tip those actively helping out. Then it depends on the person(s) with available funds to actively do so.
- Create a āsupportā role and/or swarm. These could have their own budget or the faunas/seeds could be in control of it, identify the support team and create a proposal to remunerate them.
In addition, the Fauna team is expected to grow with the community in size and the most active, helpful and mature Support-bees are the ones that will be nominated to become a Fauna as well.
We all welcome your thoughts in this matter and want to ask if you:
- could share your ideas on how to best move forward.
- Identify yourself and/or others that should be in the Support swarm.
We could set some minimum requirements, for example:
- Being verified
- Spending at least 5 hours/week (?) helping
- Positive behaviour, i.e. friendly, not condescending
But we are open to inputs here as well. Thanks in advance and letās make this great community even better!