Hello all,
after our discussion about more roots I got the impression that for some of you the topic of more roots is quite urgent. To be honest I feel not very well to just add a few roots at the moment. So I thought a compromise and created a new user-group: Operators [1]. Operators have a limited set of advantage rights – enough to help the roots and do every-day-jobs, but not enough rights to have access to sensible data (so no approval from WMDE or WMF is necessary). For testing I gave operator-status to the following people: Merl, who manage SGE already, Danny_B, who manage the user-store already, and Platonides who volunteered. There will be more in the future, but at the moment these 3 will do. In the new group the operators can collect experience while helping the users and the TS. And the roots can see who could get root-status someday and who not. The group is also a good place for users who like to help the TS, but can not invest the same amount of time like a root.
So let's see if this solution works.
Sincerely, DaB.
[1] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Operators