Support and Training Committee

1995 Annual Report


The SAT Committee has concentrated recent efforts at making the support and training structure more clear - both in practice and in documentation related to the SAT Committee. This has resulted in a number of changes, some of which have not yet been completed. The documentation on the SAT structure is now publicly available through:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Chebucto/SAT/SAThome.html

The SAT Committee consists of 5 main teams, each headed by a team leader who takes responsibility for the smooth operation of that team. The team leader also serves as a liaison between the chair of the SAT Committee and the individual teams. After many changes in the past year, both at the level of the chair and the team leaders, the status of the individual teams is as follows:

1. User Training
Clive Bagley is the current team leader. Most of his efforts have concentrated on teaching regular user training courses, preserving access to our Dalhousie training site, and maintaining the on-line training schedule. He has also been 'apprenticing' some other CCN volunteers who are interested in working with training.
2. IP Training
Bob Adams is current IP Training team leader, although this positioni was held by Carol Sin (Wulfman) for most of the past year. Their efforts have included providing regular ip training courses as well as developing more on-line tutorials and assessment packages for IPs. Bob Adams is currently making some adjustments to how IP training is approached.
3. PAT training
This position had not been active since CCN's early days but was recently reinstated. Doug Rigby was appointed team leader in late January and has been working with Gary Floyd to familiarise himself with current PAT sites.
4. Userhelp
The position of team leader was filled and vacated several times within the past year before the current leader, Ariannah Halliwell, accepted responsibility for userhelp. Since then, the major impetus has been clarifying and documenting userhelp procedures. This has made the userhelp team much more efficient, providing a better level of service to CCN users. The procedures are still being reviewed and will soon be available through the SAT Committee pages.
5. Help Documentation
The documentation team has been small but active for the past year, first under Bonny Lee and, more recently, under David Potter. Work has included changes to the current Help Desk to make it more user friendly and comprehensive. Current efforts are also being made to make the help documentation more modular for easy adaptation by other community nets and freenets adopting the CSuite software package. The documentation team has been actively working with other users of CSuite software.

In addition to these projects, the SAT committee is currently reviewing the mailing lists in use by SAT with the goal of eliminating lists that are no longer needed. SAT is also working in connection with the Windsor Community Net project.

As well, the SAT committee is hoping to develop team leader 'kits' to ease the transition when a team leader moves on to something else. These would include information on the structure of CCN, background information the team leader should have, a list of who's who in SAT, a list of relevant mailing lists for the team in question, etc. We also hope to identify what volunteers are currently working with some of the larger teams in an effort to bring more structure to the teams as well as to recognize the efforts of the volunteers who devote a great deal of time to support and training on CCN.

Respectfully submitted,

Jan Fullerton, chair