Redefining Professional Role on Discord

Summary

The Odin Project Discord server has a "Professional" role (purple color) that is not matching up with its written description. After discussion in the July Maintainer meeting it was proposed to update the Professional role descriptions across Discord and GitHub.

References

• Professional role description from the discord-roles.md in top-meta on GitHub: "We have members of our community that are here to help others to grow, because they are employed in a software engineering role. We wanted to highlight those individuals so that their experiences in the workplaces helps others make more educated decisions. This role is up to the discretion of the Core team. It does require a verification step, and the admittance is not guaranteed."

• Professional role description from the Discord #roles: "Users who are verified as professional employed software engineers."

• Professional role description from the Discord #faq: "The 'professional' role is limited to those who are verified industry professionals such as software engineers, software developers, web developers, and other associated software development team roles. Please DM @Modmail with your LinkedIn or some other form of proof of full time employment to be granted this role."

• Description of the #professionals channel from the Discord: "A place for professionals to talk about their profession."

Motivation

• Currently the Professional role is being given to community members who do not meet the description requirements listed above.

• Some of these community members are being perceived with certain authority for their role color (purple) and/or are providing incorrect information.

• Because the description implies the Professional role (purple color) equals a professionally employed and verified software engineer, fellow learners in the community might get the wrong idea from certain members who are not software engineers but speaking on the subject with perceived authority.

• It has been proposed to rewrite and expand the written requirements beyond software engineers and be more inclusive to other technical software roles and celebrate the positive influence that Odin Project has on multiple career trajectories. This would also help learners understand that those with the purple Professional role are not all software engineers.

• Additionally, trying to gatekeep or remove the Professional role from non-software engineers on the server would take up valuable time from the Staff and possibly hurt relations within the community

Suggested implementation

• Hold an async discussion within this issue with the entire staff (Core, Maintainers and Moderators) on the Professional role

• Rewrite the written descriptions of the Professional role across GitHub and Discord to ensure we prevent misunderstandings about the role in the community

• Rewrite a better process for the verification process, including how staff evaluates the application and any requirements for whether someone has officially started in the role yet or is waiting for their start date

Drawbacks

• Coming up with a consensus view on what the Professional role requirements should be and phrasing

• Taking time to draft up the new descriptions, get feedback and vote on a final copy

• Verifying community members for the role itself takes time and may require consensus voting from Core (per original description of the role)

Alternatives

• Alternately, we could remove the purple color from the Professional role on the Discord server while maintaining the #professionals channel. This would solve the perceived authority problem of the purple color but allow professionals to still have a channel for conversations. This might make verification decisions easier on the staff.

• Or we could remove both the color and the channel altogether

Additional

• Initial discussion thread from staff-discussions channel on Discord

Next Steps

• This issue will be shared with the entire Odin staff on Discord

• After receiving input from staff for 1 week the issue author (Daniel) will follow through on the suggested implementation with the help of any additional staff who volunteers OR will seek an alternative implementation