The Reasons
To explain why the Reward exists, we first have to step back into the context surrounding the creation of U.U.A.
Jacob (javaJake) initially started a support service to provide cheap support to Ubuntu users who were repeatedly frustrated by the lack of "snappy", yet in-depth one-on-one guidance. The volume of support requests, however, soon overwhelmed him.
Despite his first failure, he believed he had tapped into a much-needed area in the Ubuntu community. Undeterred, he decided to share the load with other people who would be called "assistants", and hopefully together they could handle the previously-unmanageable load.
Here's where the Exceptional Assistant Reward comes in: he still believed assistants should be rewarded if they did a superior job. When he created U.U.A., he did so with both assistants and the users in mind. Thus, this system has a double advantage:
- Assistants are motivated to make their users happy and satisfied.
- Users have a great experience and a glow of hope, whereas before they would've fought to receive an answer anywhere else.
The Steps Towards Receiving the Reward
- A user nominates the assistant for the reward, due to the assistant's exceptional performance and behavior.
- The administrators review each nomination seperately, and look for the following criteria (subject to change!):
- The assistant followed all of the rules, obviously.
- The problem was fully solved, or the user clearly felt it was solved well enough. If the problem could not be solved by that assistant, the assistant got the user down the right path towards the solution, which includes what and where to ask or to look for.
- The assistant communicated well with his/her user very well in all things. The user never felt he was "dropped", confused, or pushed aside by his/her assistant.
- There will be unique challenges that present themselves, which we cannot always anticipate here. Generally, we consider how well the assistant coped with the situation presented to him.
- We accept and collect the nominations, and wait until the end of the month to select the best out of all presented. The assistant will recieve an award through PayPal the following month. We consider $10 to be the average reward awarded to assistants, and we will raise it if the winning nomination is extraordinarily good.