[Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission

[Thehelpfulone]

On 23 Apr 2012, at 13:02, Thomas Goldammer <thogol at googlemail.com> wrote:

>> 
>> You can clearly document the process that you follow. You can publish
>> metrics like those Lodewijk suggested (and actual numbers, not just
>> guesses). It would be nice to have a page on meta that says how many
>> cases are currently at each point in the process and is kept
>> up-to-date.
> 
> You just volunteered to set up such a page on Meta (for 2012, I mean).
> I already described the process we use, so this should be possible for
> you to do. Thanks.

Touché. I believe that if the process is going to be put on Meta we do need actual numbers as opposed to your guesstimations. Hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult to sort out, if you do some searches on Gmail for all the emails that you have received in the last year from the mailing list you should be able to get a better number of the volume of emails that you got overall in the year.

> 
>> 
>> The ombudsmen commission has always felt to me to be the most
>> cabalistic of all the committees and groups we have. A lot of people
>> don't know it even exists or what it really does. All I tend to hear
>> about it is when people are complaining that their emails have gone
>> into the black box, never to be seen again.
> 
> Well, we are not going to advertise our services to everyone in
> person. If the people do not know that we exist, that's not our fault
> but the fault of the community. What we are doing is already described
> on the Meta page. If someone has sent a complaint and never gets any
> answer, then this is of course our fault, and it shouldn't happen. A
> little reminder usually does the trick, though. As you know, we are
> all not 24/7 OC workers doing nothing else in our lives. It can always
> happen that some email gets stuck in spam filters or just gets
> overlooked especially on days when you receive a hundred or more
> wiki-related emails, which is about every day in the year. I think
> what could really help is if we could use the OTRS ticket system for
> our work (that's an idea that just now came into my mind)... But I
> don't know how secure that is and if it is even possible to set it up
> so closed that only the OC members can access those tickets. (Any
> suggestions from Philippe about that?)

I don't think that OTRS is the necessarily the best option - unless you use it in collaboration with the mailing list, i.e someone sends a complaint to OTRS, the commission discusses on the mailing list and then send out a response to the user. You would be able to easily keep track of what tickets have been answered, but as far as I am aware the OTRS admins are technically able to view all the emails in any queues - so that would be another 12ish people plus devs that would be able to view the tickets. I'm not saying that they would, but bearing in mind a fair number of the OTRS admins are checkusers/oversighters themselves, I think there will be some issues with using OTRS.

> 

Thehelpfulone