How we decided on Nest applications

Hi, my name is Dispherical (dis-SFEER-ih-kul) and you most likely know me as one of the current Nest administrators.

Recently, you have seen us start accepting applications for nest administrators and I personally like looking at all applications in depth. However, a large number of applications worry me. They're structured in a way that they think would impress us.

A large number of applications mentioned adding some form of agentic artificial intelligence, such as scanning user content for unlawful content (major privacy creep) or adding a large language model chatbot to help people. These chatbots have a large hallucination problem and, for new users, can arguably provide outdated commands (which simply do not work) or dangerous commands (which won't break Nest but can render your container unusable)

The other problem was some applications just did not understand the concept of Nest. For context, Nest provides you with a Linux Container (similar to a virtual machine), which you interact with via a web dashboard or a secure shell. It's similar to ordering a virtual private server from Digital Ocean or Contabo.

Some people stated they would improve "availability" (one application just said "availability" and that was it, just one word), some stated the Nest application was too long, and other stated they would make it faster to provision containers (although, provisioning takes one API call, which, Proxmox spins up containers instantly). The problem was not that concerns weren't valid, but, they didn't specify how they would do it.

The questions did have a purpose as well.

1. We collected your Name, E-mail, Slack ID, and the means of address so we could contact you and update you on your application status. Many other Slack teams don't do this.
2. We asked for your timezone and schedule. More availability didn't make you a better candidate, it just allowed us to get a good estimate of when you would be online.
3. To understand what skills you had, we asked what contribution you've made to Hack Club and projects you were proud of.
4. To see if you've used Nest before, we asked if you had hosted a project on Nest before it shut down or after it started back up.
5. Lastly, the most important one, what you would add or change about Nest. I touched on this question a bit ago but it allowed us to see if you really knew what you were talking about, and if you could identify problems and come up with proper fixes to them.

Let me give some really good examples of that last question

1. One person said they would add alpine as an operating system as a lightweight option. A simple answer. Perfect!
2. One person stated they would write documentation and just generally help out. Also a really good answer, there's not really a set job description of Nest administrators besides making sure it still works.
3. Another person stated they would add self-serve ZFS backups to nest and, using Bun, would allow users to safely interact with it, which would give the user experience.
4. Another would improve communication as a weak spot and cover additional timezones.

That's how we decided on applications. We tried to put some meaning behind how we decided.