Research:Teahouse/Maître d' role

This page documents the creation of a "Maître d'" role at the Teahouse.

Maître d' purpose

During the pilot phase of the Teahouse, some daily administration tasks were fulfilled by a WMF-staffed project team. As the Teahouse moves to an increasingly sustainable volunteer-led model, we've identified a series of tasks that require ongoing support and that can and should be fulfilled by volunteers.

The creation of a Maître d' role for the Teahouse is a proposed method to transfer ongoing housekeeping tasks more fully to the community of volunteers who keep Teahouse going strong.

What the Maître d' IS

• a temporary volunteer position filled by one or a couple of Teahouse hosts at the time.
• a community organizer fostering continued engagement in the project.
• a moderator making sure that participants follow the guidelines of the space and things run smoothly for new editors.
• a point-of-contact for other issues needing attention.
• a role that will evolve over time.

What the Maître d' is NOT

• an administrator (you don't get any special tools!)
• the official manager of the Teahouse
• the boss of anyone

Proposed duties

All hosts should participate in these as much as possible, but the Maître d' would be specifically responsible to fulfill or delegate them.

• Welcome new hosts.
• Monitor answers at Q&A board to make sure new editors are being engaged in the friendly Teahouse way.
• Provide gentle reminders about Teahouse expectations to hosts and drop-in participants when needed.
• Monitor questions for inappropriate content including questions that should be removed. (i.e. potential socks, troublesome or disruptive questions, etc) .
• Move off-topic questions to their appropriate location as needed: move questions from new editors about editing Wikipedia from the talk page to the Q&A board, move unanswered questions up to the top of the Q&A forum, and move inappropriate questions off to a talk page.
• Monitor guest profiles for any problems with templates, images, aggressive language, etc and clean up as necessary.
• Monitor Teahouse pages and templates for vandalism or random unexplained revisions.
• Remind answerers in the Q&A forum to post talk-back templates to guests, or post on their behalf.
• Monitor monthly activity metrics (invites, Q&A, hosts, etc) to make sure systems are working well..

Process

• Any host who wants to participate in this role signs up in a list
• The position rotates through the list of signups, with each person taking a 1 month shift (note this is intended as a general guidelines: someone can leave this role early if needed, or signup for second shifts if they enjoy it!)
• A set of guidelines will be created and posted in the host lounge for the Maître d' to refer to, along with a brief description of the role, the signup list for those interested, and an indication of who currently fills the role
• The current maître d' should identified by some means: (TBD - ideally this would display in their host profile, etc)

Questions

• What's the fun/easy way for the Maître d' to be identified (badge/etc)?

About adding to the pages:

• Use the host spot we have at the top of TH landing page (or every page) for the maître d' (I don't really want to add anything else to the header area), or
• Put them at the top spot of the hosts page with some sort of badge.

+badge to put on their userpage if they want.

Wanna be a Maître d'? Sign up!

You're welcome to add or remove yourself at anytime.

• I Jethrobot (talk) 00:24, 7 October 2012 (UTC) (starting in November 2012)
• Your name here!
• Your name here!
• Your name here!
• Your name here!