[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation's support of OTRS

[James Alexander]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Rjd0060 <rjd0060.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > To clarify, the Foundation support that would be appreciated here is from
> > the tech/ops group.  We've had good response from other staff on related
> > issues, and that is much appreciated.
> >
> > --
> >
> > Ryan
> > User:Rjd0060
> >
>
> To clarify even further, from my perspective:
>
> I've been an Volunteer Response Team agent since 2009, and a leader (OTRS
> admin) since 2010.   In that time the control of OTRS moved from a function
> that had a designated staff role of "control" to one of community
> management.  In the past two and a half years Philippe has been our contact
> for support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and he has done a fantastic job
> supporting myself and the time with advice and Foundation resources as they
> have been gathered.  Over the past year, Maggie Dennis has transitioned
> into this role as the Foundation rep for OTRS.  She has done an equally
> wonderful job in being proactive and helping us with our thoughts and
> needs.
>
> I would in no way construe the support we've gotten from LCA than anything
> less than they have to give as far as they have been able to get us.
>
> Yes, that is a very long sentence.
>
> --
> ~Keegan
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
> _______________________________________________
>
>

Yeah, I have to agree sadly that we need more tech support and this has
been a thing that has been ongoing for a while. I personally think it
should remain in the foundation for many reasons (the least of which is
relatively large legal reasons) but we REALLY need to focus on it, or a
replacement, more.

OTRS is the public face of not only the projects but the foundation in
general and answers an absolutely insane amount of  email every year and
that has been the case for a while. When I first started applying to work
at the foundation my big interview ended up being about 8 hours (with a
liquor break in the middle) explaining to Philippe how I thought OTRS
needed to be replaced. I thought, and continue to think, that the system
underserves the job and we would be better served with something else that
could take much better advantage of modern advancements and clarity in
purpose.

Sadly at the time they didn't have the money for me to work on OTRS (and so
I came to do the fundraiser) and since then I have heard rumors of it's
upgrade or replacement every single year (multiple times) only to be told
later that the resources aren't available. I've seen us look at the upgrade
multiple times, I've heard it be called both new "ceiling wax and cake
frosting" but not necessarily called a good option. It may be, I don't know
and we (as usual with outside products) overwork it beyond measure. Even
the professional OTRS folks when we were talking to them about helping
upgrade basically said "errr, you have HOW much in the database?" and told
us to just abandon it and start fresh with their new version. That said
even their internal OTRS version wasn't upgraded yet last year ....

We need to do something though, it is disappointing to me that it hasn't
been a bigger priority because I think it should have been and I think it
should be now. I'm not sure if an OTRS upgrade is the best option... but it
is probably better then what we have. For a long while I thought we should
wait and not upgrade so that we can just replace it... but clearly it's
been too long for that now.

James