Here’s the beginning of a conversation about sharing user support among instances (English-speaking at first). Since we have chosen to land on a spherical planet where it’s all times all at once depending on where we are, there may be an opportunity to provide what amounts to 24 hrs/day support to users. The advantages of building this process include responsiveness to users, efficiency, learning and teaching between instances, identification and use of best practices, the start of a global knowledge base. Some possible disadvantages might include disproportionate/uneven contribution from instances, awkward hand off of “cases” between instances, integration of support as a function of service levels (i.e. if a user pays more for a higher level of support, how does that get done?), maintaining a fairly consistent communication/cultural style with case management, selection and use of the right tool to manage user cases, communication, and capture of solutions, and more.
Topic born in Slack and moved here for more consideration. Just to capture that conversation:
@tschumilas: So yes - if you want to set up a separate slack that would be great. Just noting Jen’s comment above that we don’t want the channel in this slack account. Jen - do you think we should set up another slack account with the intention that any instance that wants to use it for user-support can?
@lauriewayne1: you should have an invite in your email to join (http://ofn-users.slack.com/) . There is a channel for usa and a channel for canada at the moment but of course we can organize it however we want (and you can easily switch between workspaces).
@Jen: perhaps just worth floating with the community more broadly that you’re setting this up
@lauriewayne1 : Yep Jen, good point. It’s created but not in use yet. Theresa, should we put a proposal together for a slack-based user support process?
@Jen: or, I wonder if now is the moment to go to your other idea Laurie of a stack exchange user support system, where solutions can get votes ? If we’re bothering to build community around something should we choose a technology system that permits that plus better searchability (which is not great in slack)? That said, better done than perfect, so don’t let my suggestion derail momentum
@lauriewayne1: we (in the US) looked a while back at setting up a discourse instance for user support (like the UK have) - that would definitely be better, except we didn’t have the capacity to set that up and maintain it. Zendesk would be sweet one day, especially if it was supporting a process that would allow for stack exchange. I can see that picking from the tools we already have and use makes sense for now, but I am constantly losing things in Slack, an I agree that its searchability leaves a lot to be desired. Trello is lovely but for me there’s a capacity issue there too (and it becomes yet another tool to fire up) - likewise with Airtable. For now I think a new workspace can help (a) isolate users from the conversations taking place in this global workspace and (b) create a cross-instance environment for user support. Sorry, I am realizing this is a discourse-level discussion - I’ll move it over there
…and here we are!
). But there is a lot of helpdesk platforms available (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Zohodesk etc). IMO a tool is needed for 3 reasons:
Don’t get me wrong - result is GREAT. But because it took so long, it extended beyond the funder’s deadline and that caused us a budget problem at OFN-CAN. Anyway, in retrospect - I learned that sometimes ‘quick and dirty’ can be good. We don’t have to all move together all the time.