Formalize alerting mechanism for Help Desk
When evaluating the FT "frontdesk" role, its expectations, and how it's done, we reached the conclusion that the queue of stuff forwarded to FT will be handled every 2 weeks in the worst case.
In most cases it's good enough, but in some cases it's not. E.g. it would be really frustrating that FT discovers after a release that we could have fixed a major bug that was reported to us before the release.
So, we thought we might benefit from an alerting mechanism, on top of the current workflow, to ensure really important and possibly urgent issues that affect many users come to the attention of FT in a timely manner. The outcome could be e.g. that we put out an emergency release, or that we start working on a fix ASAP so it makes it into our next release, or that we publish a blog post.
@emmapeel uses XMPP for this kind of things. Another way could be to mention @foundations-team on GitLab, which could help e.g. in cases when no FT member is online.
emmapeel and intrigeri agreed that we should formalize this and make it explicitly part of @help-desk's mission.
emmapeel volunteered to document this on https://tails.boum.org/contribute/working_together/roles/help_desk/