I’ve noticed on Discourse I’m a “Steward” as are a lot of users. How is that set and what does it mean?
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Folks are encouraged to volunteer at Asmbly with no particular skillset or knowledge, and to do it as frequently or infrequently as they want. Volunteers are generally given well-defined tasks or work with someone experienced for more complex things.
Stewards have gone the extra mile and have demonstrated a commitment to volunteering for one or more shops, and have done an onboarding for those shops (this has been formalized a bit recently, so folks who’ve been around a while might not have done this explicitly). They’re expected to have a general level of knowledge about the shop. They don’t have to be experts on everything in the shop, but they know who to ask, and they’re trusted to do things without needing supervision and to identify problems and fix them on their own.
For example, stewards in the 3D Printing space know things like where we keep certain consumables and how to refill/refresh them when they run out. If a problem report comes in about something they think they can handle, they’re welcome to just handle it.
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Maybe we should flesh out this page a bit more: Stewards - Asmbly Wiki
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I’m sure I’m wrong based on your comment, but funnily enough I’d thought that shop specific “stewards” were being done away with in favor of general volunteers.
I became a shop lead relatively quickly after becoming a volunteer (so I may be missed something), but never officially became a steward of any specific space- I just fix what I can lol.
That being said, strongly agree on further threshing out the wiki pages on this so there is clear understanding!
Volunteers used to be split into two categories: ambassadors and stewards. Ambassadors were friendly volunteers willing to help and stewards were that plus tool maintenance.
We had so few people interested in being volunteers without learning about tools that we did away with the distinction. Now everyone is just a volunteer. Since the language was in use for so long, it’s been tough to get all our communications to say volunteer instead of steward, and steward is a bit more descriptive, so I haven’t much minded.
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TBH we should just redirect the steward page to the volunteer page. I’ll do that now.
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How does that title get applied to members on the forum and do you believe it is being correctly applied?
Thanks for the clarification, @Sid!
It gets applied in Discourse based on whether a member’s Neon account has been marked as “Steward” which allows them access into the stewards closet for extra supplies. We don’t have a regular practice of pruning this list so I would bet there are a lot more people with the title than are active in their contributions. We’ve also taken the mindset that we’re happy to have people contribute off and on as they’re able and I think that further leads to us not being too eager to regularly prune the list.
@Iammikecohen You have the title because you applied to be a part of the volunteer program. You never attended the onboarding though!