[gcd-membership] Recruiting more indexers

[Mike Nielsen]

One thought on membership, is if part of this is tied to how many active indexers we have, then we need to do a better job of mentoring new people.

Just some background for those that might not remember the "bad old days".  :)

Several years ago there was no easy way to become an indexer in the GCD.  You had to be really persistent to even get anybody's attention.  There was an email address on the website that sent things to the membership Coordinator Ken Lemons.  Ken was not very good at getting back to people.  When I rejoined those years ago, I had emailed him several times trying to get an account set up.  After a few months of that I finally sent a message to the error list which finally got somebody's attention.

Then a few years back we finally created a contact email list that several of us monitored.  This spread the workload around and made it easier to get accounts set up for people that wanted to join.

Now we have an automated system that allows them to create accounts as they go.  I've not been back on the Editor list long so maybe it's been unusually active the last week or so, but I see several new accounts set up every day, with an email to the editor list that these people need "mentors".

What I don't see is every person signing up getting a mentor.  And I don't think we really have enough active editors to mentor these folks at the rate they are coming in.  When I'm heavily involved in mentoring people I usually try not to juggle more than 2 or 3 at a shot.

Also, back when it was the contact list, I would guess that roughly 1 in 10 people that emailed for an account actually tried to do any indexing.  Even less of those stuck with it.

So we have a two-fold problem in this area, as I see it.  1st we are not welcoming these people with any type of instructions on how to index when they join, and second if they do manage to do a few things then leave we are not figuring out why they stopped.

Now some of this will probably work itself out over time, we are still adjusting to the new system.
 
Mike Nielsen
 
Atom: "They are replicating."
Aquaman: "Yes, and they are making more of themselves too!"
 - Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon episode "Journey to the center of the Bat" 





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[Lou Mazzella]

I think most editors wait until someone submits their first bit of information to the pending queue before they choose to mentor someone in the new system. This is what I did when I mentored Mark. We definitely have far more people signing up for accounts than are actually submitting data. Does anyone have a copy of the email that people get when they sign up for an account? Would it be better for indexers to choose a mentor from a pool rather than the other way around? -Lou --- On Sat, 4/17/10, Mike Nielsen <rasta...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[Lionel English]

I don't think so...  you'd need to do something to prevent everyone from picking the same mentor (Ooh!  Ooh!  I want Nielsen!  I want him!), which could probably be done programmatically (e.g. anyone with three mentees doesn't show up as available); but it still wouldn't match people of similar interests (unless the mentors' interests were also shown to the potential mentees).

I think a larger pool of mentors might help, which brings us back to the question of how do we get more existing indexers more involved in the project?

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Lionel English
lio...@beanmar.net