Grants talk:IdeaLab/Develop a peer-to-peer counseling forum

Examples of precedent

This service would be modeled after existing assistance lines, which traditionally have been managed by phone and increasing are managed with email.

Stonewall (on Wikipedia en:Stonewall (charity)) is a United Kingdom-based organization which manages an assistance line with an information service and is an example of an organization which we could model. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:10, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Who would staff the help line?

It is not certain. The Wikimedia community does not have either training or security infrastructure to manage this at this time. It might be best to pay another organization to allow us to use their help line, since the Wikimedia community demand for this is not great but also not measured. Depending on need, then if it makes since, in-house Wikimedia infrastructure could be developed. For now, the priority should be on providing the least reasonable amount of service which is more than nothing at all, so that at least we can have a safety net and begin to measure the extent of our need. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:10, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Private communication channel

If the Wikimedia community were to develop this service in-house, it could be done by email and with an extra-secure OTRS queue. Trusted individuals who are trained in some way could staff the line and respond in some way that is useful and also somehow provides de-identified data about the problems which the service identifies so that steps can be taken to address them. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:10, 3 October 2014 (UTC)