Using the Community Representative as a go-between can be inefficient and time-consuming

[rabernat]

Context

I am the "community representative" on two (soon to be three) Pangeo-style hubs:

• main Pangeo hub
• LEAP
• M2Lines

I was motivated to open this issue by the ongoing discussion in 2i2c-org/infrastructure#1168 (comment) about who should be community representative

After the initial setup, I feel like my only activity as community representative for these hubs is to send emails to [email protected] which say "please address this user-reported issue". (Recent example.) Because I am very oversubscribed, using me as a message broker is not a good system. More generally, I don't feel like I'm adding value to these conversations.

Proposal

I propose that we modify the role of the community representative, specifically around these two items:

https://github.com/2i2c-org/docs/blob/8cd550520f8ea5bed317916ca730b40cee40f544/about/roles.md?plain=1#L21-L22

We need to answer the following question: is it the community representative's job to do any initial screening or triage of user-reported issues before forwarding them to 2i2c?

• If YES, then we need to provide more details on the expected triage by the community representative. How long should the community representative be expected to spend investigating a problem before escalating it to a 2i2c issue? 5 mins? 1 hour? What technical expertise should the community representative have in order to do this triage? I have quite a bit of expertise, but I have no time. Other member of our project have time, but less expertise. Is there a knowledge base that these front-line community reps can use to support the initial issue triage?
• If NO, then I propose we simply eliminate these two responsibilities and allow users to to directly open support tickets with 2i2c? If this will have extra costs associated with it, can we price those costs? For all my hubs, I would much rather just pay 2i2c more than have to play this role of message broker in our support ticket system.

The answer may depend on the hub in question. For these research hubs with relatively few, expert users, I think it makes sense to just have users open tickets directly. For educational hubs, where there is an instructor in between, the answer may be different.

I also understand the desire to limit support traffic to the 2i2c engineering team. But at the end of the day, users need support, and we should find a way to provide it as efficiently as possible. I am optimistic that the new, to-be-hired community manager will help with this a lot.

Updates and actions

No response

[choldgraf]

Just wanted to provide a datapoint of the inefficient workflow that @rabernat describes above.

• In this LEAP discussion board, a user opened up a question noting that there was a 500 error on their OAuth: Server Issue leap-stc/leap-stc.github.io#10

  

• Several hours later, @rabernat noticed this discussion item, and directly opened up a FreshDesk ticket that referenced this discussion.

  

In this case, there's little chance that a Community Representative would be able to help with something like a "500 OAuth Configuration Error", so I can see how adding an extra step in the support chain could result in unnecessary extra turnaround time.

Also I renamed the issue title to reflect the proposal in the top comment, and am also moving this to our team compass for better visibility.