User:Torben Trautman/volunteers

Volunteer program

All volunteers, be it mentors or greeters, should feel like working in and as a team to improve the Second Life experience of all residents. While mentors focus on helping the more seasoned residents with quality assistance, greeters welcome new residents, help them get comfortable with the basics of Second Life and make their first impression of Second Life unforgettable.

Mentors and greeters should have the same premises to start in the volunteer program, share where possible the same training components, meetings and events. Especially the training is a good opportunity to learn value the advantages of working as a team and found the basics of a "befriended volunteer group".

Five step approach to become a volunteer

• Basics: Apprentices can choose between building, scripting and texturing to expand their own basic skills. During this one hour class offered by a Mentor Coach they learn the basics of the chosen topic, meet other apprentices and get in contact with an experienced mentor.

• Skills: In the skills class apprentices expand their SL-Skills while taking a SL-Tour with a tour guide, learning about finding useful resources like the wiki and the knowledge base or joining a new user FAQ where typical new user questions are discussed.

• Apprentices visit a orientation session where they learn about the TAO, the mentors role and the greeters role, useful resources, the mailing list and the blog, group chat guidelines and the purpose of the volunteers program. After the orientation they choose wether they want to be a greeter or a mentor.

• Future mentors take the mentors test and future greeters take the greeters test.

• Each volunteer should experience shadowing an expert mentor or greeter
  • Mentor apprentices shadow an experienced mentor on Help Island Public or another of the different places where seasoned residents go and look for help
  • Greeter apprentices shadow an experienced greeter on a welcome area where new residents land.

Sidenotes

• Mentors and greeters would have to spend four hours of learning in order to finish their test. Given that they finish the training within a month a four-hour-commitment to volunteering would make sense.

• Clarifying that Mentors are still loved by the VTeam and needed will be easier with shared training, meetings and events while the different focus of both kinds of volunteers will do the rest.

• Greeters should be able to ask for help in the mentors group and vice versa. Although I have no clue how that might work technically it would bond both groups together and make sure that greeters are not overwhelmed when meeting an experienced new user with specific questions and mentors could call for a greeter when stumbling over a new resident. (One way might be to keep the greeters role in the mentors group while having a greeters group for land access.)

• Thinking about this was fun.