OLPC:Volunteer Infrastructure Group/RT/Strategy

RT Strategizing

a draft for OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group

In which we try and develop a big picture view of RT and what folks do with it, want it to do differently, or want to do to it. And then prioritize and chunk all of that, and get to it :)

Interested Parties

Support teams

I have a good start on what Support wants and needs from RT from my own work with it for SG and the wonderful tickets Adam and Henry have worked up for Kim in RT #14244 RT Structural Changes Needed for G1G1 2008.

In fact this got broken out into individual tickets which are linked to that one. Together they are a great outline of the bugfixes and feature requests coming out of SG. I believe the other queues / support teams such as volunteers@ and donor services have similar needs and look forward to hearing about those details as well.

Management

Management has uses of and needs for RT. The issue of organization of queues, categories, and related meta-data is crucial to visibility and utility of the aggregate data in RT which management needs to make their decisions and to get us more resources. We were able to generate some rough numbers and simple graphs(xxx) from RT towards the middle (peak?) of G1G1 2007, and I know they'd like more/better. Input from management is crucial to getting the most of our efforts.

Metadata and Workflow

Metadata

Queues, requestor and user, status and dates, time worked ... categories and other CustomFields,

Workflow

queues, categorization, Triage, Assignment

Spam filtering

cuda (external) and tagging (internal to RT)

Analysis and Reporting

All metadata and workflow work needs to improve data gathering and analysis.

RT Infrastructure

And then there's the RT system(s) themselves. Among items of interest here is certainly the notion of getting current with RT's 3.8 release. This should provide some of our teams' desired features, enhanced performance and safety, and new shiny buttons to click (Oh, and calendar integration). It almost goes without saying that a major upgrade will have to be thoroughly researched, tested, triple-checked ... it's a major undertaking.

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xxx Those of you with access to the Support-Gang list archives can look for mails like this one Subject: [support-gang] State of the Q (in pictures!) from Date: May 17, 2008 5:54:24 AM EDT, or if you have RT you can bring up some of the graphs from help@ from any graph page under support's saved searches.