On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Keegan Peterzell <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Rjd0060 <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
