How to support the support team

[Harry]

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 “pollen”, which will turn into HNY.
• The Help channel is ‘boosted’ 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 ‘cred-minting’ 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 doesn’t boost the help given in other channels, it doesn’t 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 can’t 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 ‘reward’ 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 ‘support’ 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 let’s make this great community even better!

[berserk]

Excellent post!
As we all know, pollen distribution is a hot topic, many people put in many hours to make this system fair for everyone. After the new discord roles were implemented, you can’t get any creds for helping new people.

In my opinion, the best approach would be to create a ‘support’ role to help people.
As the community grows, the ‘support’ group should be the first line to help people and if they don’t know something, they should escalate to fauna/seeds which would have more information.

Over time, fauna/seeds should be decoupled from support questions and only manage and help the support group - they have better things to do.

@Harry

Create a ‘support’ 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.

[theseeker]

Thank you for writing this up. I absolutely love the idea of a support role and having some requirements to get it. I know that there is a handful of us in the help channels that are helping users right and left. Yesterday for example was an absolute wild ride. Looking forward to seeing where this goes and what everyone else thinks. Again thank you for taking the time to recognize the efforts of the help team!

[Rod]

Lovely post Harry, i like that this issue is being addressed.
I personally like the honey pot route to reward the support team. Although i also hop in the help channels every once in a while to reward the bees who are supporting newcomers

[oliver_30]

Great topic as usual @Harry,

As a new-BEE like me, it is very difficult to receive recognition from the community because you are new and you will spend many hours before that happens. And I think it’s hard to get inside of the group especially when there’s already group formed in the community.
I’ve been in the community for almost two weeks but I find it hard to get recognized, you can see me often on the help and channel I tried to help answer some inquiries with the knowledge I also acquired from the community.
I’m not really after the compensation but the feeling of being recognize I think is the most important and greatest reward you can get.
And it’s really awkward to ask for some to give you a reaction, I feel like I’m begging for recognition.

I think as of now we can assign 2 or 3 people from Fauna or maybe from Bee role to scan thru help channel and give appropriate reward until a HELP/support group is formed and a better system is implemented.

[onbjerg]

FWIW Fauna was actually created as a support/moderation group, and it is already funded, so there is a fixed support role. Either we should be more inclusive to who can be in Fauna or we should limit the responsibility of Fauna and therefore also the funding.

I’m not answering support questions because I have to btw, I do it because I want to/can’t help myself. The narrative that Seeds have to be “decoupled” from support/help is not one I am in favor of because that is already the case. Seeds usually just help out in the various channels when they have time/want to.

If the idea is to separate support out of Fauna, then (as mentioned before) we should decrease funding for Fauna, and someone should create an entirely new swarm with a budget they control themselves, and their own rules for who is in the swarm. It would also be helpful to set some expectations around what platforms this swarm would be present, because we have to remember that the forums and the Discord are still not “official” platforms, so some people might argue that the Telegram group should also be included.

[Cryptonianz]

Great idea, at the moment I think most people will assume only the ‘bees’ roles have the privilege/trusted to provide supports and yes, the helper-bees already actively doing the supports.

Here are my ideas:
Firstly, to assign a support group with a specific skills/assigned task. for example technical issues such as Metamask issue with RPC, xdaichain bridge related issues, blockscout.

Secondly, less technical issues such as brightid related, how to join pollen, unable to claim from the faucet or issue with the honeycomb (LP issues). With these ‘assigned’ tasks it give a fair task rather than 1 person chasing for all supports that he/she can.
Thirdly, we do have people from different timezone, these people can be a big help too for support around the clock.

Note: the above roles can be rotated throughout the week. It can be done in non-English support channel as well.

I favour the idea of make a proposal to create a ‘support’ role and/or swarm or funded support.

[onbjerg]

@Cryptonianz

With these ‘assigned’ tasks it give a fair task rather than 1 person chasing for all supports that he/she can.

I sort of disagree with this because ‘fair’ is a super loaded term and this rests on the assumption that rewards should be split evenly amongst people who do support, which I don’t think is the case. If you resolve more cases with swiftness and accuracy I feel the rewards should follow.

[aasir]

Great post @Harry !!!
Everything on point

[Kryptobi]

Quite frankly, i see no issues here. To me its just like introducing problems where there is none. Most people that will allude to this are either not aware of the role of the fauna swarm or just out there to get HNY and not necessarily because of support. As far as i’m concerned, support is awesome. The Help channel is never short of willing helpers, this demonstrates that the pollen incentivization is clearly working. So why expose it to exploitation or more gaming by incentivizing support even more?

@Harry

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.

I’m confused here. I’ll be glad if you can help me understand what this means “Provide support on social platforms including Discourse and Discord" from the fauna proposal Here when fauna were soliciting support for the proposal that will fund the swarm and pay 10 members of Fauna 1HNY each every month. I saw the need for this and fully supported and threw my weight behind that proposal. now i’m confused.

@Harry

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 ‘cred-minting’ emoji.

I think pollen is enough incentivization to any bee that wants to help with support, especially considering that the weights for the help channel is boosted. Besides we are not lacking bees willing to provide support, what it simply means is that pollen incentivization is working. Maybe i will understand if it was difficult for new bees to receive help in the help channel, but that is far from the case.
We don’t necessarily have to incentivize everything, i’m not saying its a bad idea but something like helping people should be voluntary, that way we recognize bees who genuinely want to help and are truly cut out for that kind of role then reward and empower them by officially incorporating them into fauna purely because they naturally fit in and deserve it. And not people wanting to help primarily because they just want to farm cred.

@Harry

Create a ‘support’ 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.

Do you mean create and fund another support for support (Fauna) sorry harry i think i lost you there.

[omahs]

Thank you @Harry for bringing this discussion about the recognition and reward for the support given here and in discord.

In my opinion, a temporary solution would be to assign 2-3 trusted members the mission to react to support messages that didn’t receive any emojis.
The current cred weight of 1.5x is good for the discord support channels. Boosting it would increase gaming.

It’s great that everyone has the opportunity to help and be rewarded, new and old members.
While I like the idea of a support team, there is a risk that some people will feel left out and unrecognized.

Another option would be to have a weekly budget and tipping it to the people who helped but using cred seems easier.

[metaverde]

I would love if something were done to better recognize the people helping newBees and supporting people off the main forums.

I can’t not help people, of course, but it does pull me from other work I would like to be doing.

[sand3sh]

Great post you are right to have a good structure to help bees and be organized.

We need some quick links to be able to be posted by support members as Bot commands in the group or to individual via DM requesting help.

Recently I could see so many RPC msgs in whole help scroll.

Basically making easy and quick to support than clicking on the user and sending a msg directly