nodata wrote:
Am Donnerstag, den 26.06.2008, 17:52 -0300 schrieb jeff:nodata wrote:Well, depending on their problem it could be as easy as just to say "open your browser and go to http://wiki...."; if there is a solution there. Newbies have trouble even finding what doc is relevant to their problem (well, not just newbies either....)Am Donnerstag, den 26.06.2008, 16:30 -0300 schrieb jeff:Kevin Fenzi wrote:Thats just a few ideas to get things going.I've always thought the following idea would be cool to implement. It's not IRC, but I figured I would throw this idea out there, especially now since you now have talk.fedoraproject.org.What about *free* telephone support? A rough outline: * newbie user has problem. Has no clue what IRC is. Knows what telephone is.* supergeeks live on IRC, read every message in fedora-devel (well, almost) and have VoIP software with talk.fedoraproject.org account.* Each supergeek, when available, goes to a webpage and clicks "available" to let fedora asterisk know they are available "agents" (in asterisk speek) that can receive calls from the support queue.* noob calls local number via the majick of a bunch of $2 DIDs around the world which connects them to the fedora asterisk server. "Welcome to the fedora telephone server..." They hit "1" for support.* fedora asterisk looks at all the available agents and routes the call to one of them."Thanks for calling Fedora support! This is supergeek $foo. How can I help?" Just an idea.... -JeffWouldn't this shift the focus away from users finding answers for themselves (RTFM, essentially) and us writing good documentation? I can only see this being useful if it fed back into a knowledge base.-JeffThen is phone support useful? I mean phones are very inefficient/disruptive (and not the "good" disruptive) for this kind of thing since they prevent you from being able to queue requests (like on irc, jabber, email, etc); they require an instant response. Giving URLs over the phobe won't be fun either.
My two cents... Pros: - It's there- It uses infrastructure that we control (we don't control the phone system, but we control our Asterisk setup)
Cons:- As pointed out by nodata, it's sometimes hard to communicate over the phone - There is an expectation for an answer, you may not know, all forms of communication online, allow for you to say to someone "I'm sorry I don't know but if you stay a little while someone else might" or (in private) "Hey guys, I don't know the answer for X anyone know and mind taking it?" followed by a transfer. - If your having a bad day, anger is a bit more predominate over the phone too, and can leave someone with a bad impression of Fedora/Fedora Community.
In essence, to much work to too little gain (phones anyway). - Nigel