Wikidot doesn't like working on my phone, I voted on the first or second day, I think.

After a discussion started by the current state of the admin contact role (Dexanote being the admin contact for seven teams, several admins not being contact for any team, some teams having four contacts and others having one), the decision reached by AdCap was that the admin contact role is that it is largely defunct, and at some level at odds with how the site operates.

The responsibilities of an admin contact (also referred to as a go-to admin) are unclear, and have been for some time. Several admin contacts do not perform any tasks for their team, and only hold the role because it is required. The only codified role in site policy is in the Staff Structure document, which defines them as the following:

Your “go-to” administrators are whom you contact with issues, problems, changes, requests, or anything else along these lines. They have been appointed to that position to help your team function and to regularly check in with team captains to see how things are going. Each team has a primary contact listed; however, all administrators listed can also act in a given situation.

Additionally, according to several discussions with thedeadlymoose, in the original framing of the Teams system in 2014, the intent would be that the admin contact would be the leading guiding voice for policy, while the Captain would be responsible for day-to-day management of the team. This was not formally encoded into policy.

There are several additional uses/roles/responsibilities for admin contacts which have been mentioned over the years; however, these are largely the result of guesswork about what the title is supposed to handle, and exist outside of the intended system.

The enumerated responsibilities of the admin contact role are now largely defunct, thanks to the transfer of site staff and chat from IRC to Discord. During the IRC period, site admins would frequently be hard to reach, and not as invested in chat structure. In the present, Discord makes admins much more reachable and able to be contacted — one can DM an admin when they are not online, as well as ping the @Administrator role to get the attention of all admins. These changes to the chat ecosystem make admins much more easily reachable, and the responsibility of being the contact for issues has been largely shifted to the admin team as a whole. The further responsibility of regularly checking in with captains and helping them function is due to the recency of the team system when this policy was written, as it was something of an experiment at the time. Now, ten years later, we are able to call the experiment a success and can formally remove some of the "training wheels" that were built in at the outset.

The implicit and intended function of the role given by moose is also largely defunct — there has been a broad sentiment that the person best suited for pushing policy forward is the one who is most involved with the day-to-day operation of the team, which the policy voice function of the admin contact is at odds with. Additionally, we have seen a significant increase in the number of Operational Staff members who put policy forward — in the current staff model, this role of policy voice has been distributed throughout the body as a whole.

As such, it is being proposed that the role of admin contact/go-to admin be formally deprecated.

This will require the removal of the role from the Staff Structure page, as well as any Team/Staff listings that include it. Any errant mentions of the role should be removed or disregarded.

Please vote on the following question: Should the admin contact / "go-to" admin role be formally deprecated?

The vote will be open for 7 days.

Voting Template:

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