one person covers roughly one working day, five days a weekweekend cover is a second person or a rota, not an extension of the firstthree timezones is three people, or one person and an accepted delayincident cover is separate again, because incidents do not wait for a shiftThe usual arrangement is one community manager covering one timezone, informally covering a second, and quietly covering the third from bed.
That arrangement holds until roughly month four, and then the person leaves.
What tooling actually does: it does not replace coverage. It reduces the number of questions that need a human, by making answers findable. That is a documentation investment wearing a software costume.
Price coverage by the hours you will answer in, and state them publicly. A community told answers come between 9 and 6 is calmer than one that gets midnight replies sometimes and a day of silence otherwise.
