Join Our Team Overview
Join One of Our Teams
We have two types of teams available. Our technical team which makes up all our volunteer techs and our non-technical team which make up our administrative positions.
Technical Team Overview
Are people always asking you to help fix their computer issues? Do you secretly enjoy doing it most of the time? I know how it is, I like helping people with computer problems myself.
Macosx.com has a unique service designed to provide personalized individual support to computer users. Using an all volunteer team of techs, we can provide users with individual technical support. Although we work much like a team, you really participate on an individual level. You choose which questions you want to answer, you choose how many questions you take on and you choose your own schedule. Being a volunteer tech is truly a volunteer experience.
Because of our team atmosphere, you won't be competing with other techs. There is no point system or rating system that will compare you with other techs on the team. I feel that your level of involvement is just as important as another techs level of involvement even if your level of involvement is significantly less than others on the team. Your knowledge area might be specific, or it might be broad; together we can cover a wide range of support questions.
How It Works
After you get approved to be on the volunteer team, you will be given access to a behind the scenes question database of all questions that are both a) new and unanswered and b) questions with recent activity. These questions range from simple questions to complex corporate setting questions. You really just never know what type of questions you will see on any given day which is what makes it so fun.
All you do is simply browse through new questions and see whether you might be able to help someone out. If you can, you reply to it and the ticket is yours. You interact with the user via our web based support system to help them with the problem they are having. If you get in over your head on an issue or unable to resolve the issue, you can send the ticket back to the open queue for another tech to take.
A great way to learn is to review recent question activity. This will show all questions that have either a user or tech response in the last three days from other team members. You can browse through and comment on tickets you might have an expertise in.
No Forum Support Here
Anybody can setup a message forum and call it a Help Forum. Here, we have a fantastic user base which provides quality support at varying degrees of skills and is its own support atmosphere. As a volunteer tech though, you will be providing people what few sites offer, individual support. No more does a user have to deal with a rogue "RTFM" posted to their question. They don't have to weigh in which person's suggestion or opinion they should try first. With personal support, only you interact with the user you want to help. Others techs can comment on your tickets you take, but only you will see them. You are the single point of contact for the user on that issue. In certain cases, you can give the question back to the open queue for another tech to take. Only under those circumstances will an end user deal with more than one tech.
Participation Levels
Your level of participation is really up to you. To maintain a sense of participation even from those less active, we require you to maintain an active subscription to our Volunteer Mail-List for random things that I might send about question activity, what is happening in the world of macosx.com and other information. In addition, a new question notification, at least once per day is required. This is just a quick email giving you all the subjects of currently active questions posted since the last notification. You can opt to have notification sent more frequently if you choose and at a time of your choice. To remain an active tech, we ask that you answer at least one question per month at an absolute minimum.
Getting Started
I hope this sounds interesting to you. We encourage if you are even remotely interested to take a moment and complete our volunteer application. Rarely will your application not be approved. I feel that anyone who wants to take the time to help others should have the opportunity to do so. If you think you lack the "resume" required to be a volunteer tech, think again. It is not your resume we are interested in, just your knowledge (even if limited) and desire to help others with technical issues.
Non-Technical Team Overview
From time-to-time we have non-technical positions available. These are usually administrative type positions that do sometimes require a certain skill set. For example, we might need someone who can handle user account issues, someone to be our site grammarian and even people just to weed through our information and put things in correct categories. These positions are fun to the right person type. A list of available position is below; assuming any are.
Non-Technical Team Openings:
- None Currently
