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How to Join OCF Staff

The OCF Staff is a group of student volunteers responsible for the administration of the Open Computing Facility. This includes helping users with questions, answering staff mail, writing and compiling programs, maintaining the OCF libraries, and writing documentation. Please note that you do not need be able to do all of these tasks to be part of OCF staff. All you need is the willingness to help others and some time to commit. Many staff members adopt only a limited number of responsibilities to accommodate busy schedules. We do not expect our staff members to devote their whole lives to the OCF. The ability to communicate with users and other staff members is probably the most important prerequisite for becoming staff.

In addition to the day to day activities of maintaining our servers and computer lab, many staff members work on team-based projects. Some of these are short term, such as writing a program to collect user feedback or new user documentation, and some are long term such as installing, maintaining, and sometimes writing software. There are even non-technical projects such as outreach to the student body by making posters and flyering/tabling on Sproul. If you are interested in working on a project at the OCF, older staff members can tell what projects are already being worked on, and what else you would need to know to get started on a project of your own.

Since the responsibilities of staff members are so varied, we welcome people with all skills and majors to OCF staff. Extensive UNIX experience is not required to join staff. However, the most helpful UNIX skills for staff members are a working knowledge of some mail program and some experience with a text editor.

We have an formal training program which takes about 30 minutes and consists of instruction on the basic knowledge every staff member should know:

  1. Approving new individual and group accounts.
  2. Finding and adding to OCF documentation on the wiki.
  3. How to post staff office hours.
  4. Printer maintenance.
  5. Checking the print queue and de-queuing print jobs.
  6. Chatting with staff on IRC.
  7. Common Windows problems.
  8. Levels of OCF permission.
  9. The structure of OCF leadership.
  10. How to recruit and train new staff.
Beyond that, how much a staff person learns from being part of OCF staff depends largely on how much that person wants to learn.

On the subject of learning, OCF staff is a great place to learn more about the UNIX operating system and the resources of the Internet. Among our rosters, we have staff members versed in a wide variety of specialties, providing quality support to over 10,000 users despite our limited hardware of about 10 *nix and 20 Windows workstations. There are opportunities to learn about hardware, networking, and the operating systems we use: Windows, Solaris (Sun UNIX), and various distributions of GNU/Linux.

As for the benefits, we don't pay, there aren't any really special perks, but it can be quite educational, can look good on a resume, and can give you a "warm fuzzy feeling inside" knowing that you're helping thousands of your fellow students.

If after reading all of this you are still interested in becoming an OCF staff member, you can get a staff orientation if you make an appointment with a current staff member during one of his/her staff hours. Just send an email that says you want to join OCF Staff to the appropriate staff member, and make an appointment to come in for an orientation. Alternatively, you can show up to one of our Board of Directors meetings, meet the whole staff crew, and then make an appointment for an orientation while in person.