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Today I had a call with Jussi from the Ubuntu IRC Council. We spent some time discussing a range of different topics, but then Jussi raised an important question which I think could benefit from some community discussion.
Today we have many methods of providing free support for our users – the Ubuntu Forums, Launchpad Answers, Ubuntu StackExchange and of course IRC. With each of the web resources there is a method of identifying those who are providing a significant and sustained contribution when providing support by checking their account profiles.
Unfortunately we don’t have this today for IRC. The simple reality is that there are many community members who use IRC every day and provide fantastically valuable support for our community, but there is no way of sufficiently articulating their contributions in a way that could, for example, be assessed for Ubuntu Membership.
The outcome I would like to achieve here is that someone in the IRC community who provides support could apply for Ubuntu Membership and the Ubuntu Membership Board could take a look at a profile that accurately and concisely summarizes their contributions, thus identifying that such contributions are significant and sustained, and therefore suitable for membership.
One option I was thinking could be something that I am thinking of as a ‘thankbot’. Imagine this context
<jono> hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z on Ubuntu?
<erica> hi jono, all you do is click on the frizometer and select babang.
<jono> ahh, that is it, thanks so much!
<erica> jono, it would be
<jono> thankbot erica
<thankbot> erica got thanked by jono - erica has been thanked: 28 times
We could then provide a means for others to check how many times a given person has been thanked, and it could be even cooler to have IRC client plug-ins that shows the number of thanks next to the persons nick.
Of course, the bot would want to be armed with the ability to not be gamed (such as limiting the number of thanks from the same person, to avoid spamming the bot), but these would all be details.
Could this work, and if not, is there a better idea out there to solve the problem of providing better visibility on our contributors who provide great support?
Original Source: http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/08/24/articulating-irc-contributions-concisely/
We now have this fantastic all in one place information on teams, global and local events. It makes finding information for everyone a lot easier. It’s come on a long way and looks rather pretty also and is still being worked on there are bugs logged for some issues so with every week there are new improvements coming.
What I have noticed however is the amount of teams there on the LD with not up to date information, no wiki page listed, no mailing list, no website, no IRC channel listed or any information about themselves and in many cases most of the teams are providing this help. We need you to update your information, that’s either through your team leader, point of contact or you have admins set up on launchpad who can edit the loco directory, if you see your team has other resources that are not listed there PLEASE ASK OF YOUR TEAM TO ADD IT!
This morning there were 69 teams listed on the LD with no fix abode 
they had no country listed against them. I’ve gone in and added them all, bar 5 which I need help on. In the LD Language is a mandatory field, I’ve added the one language against each team, you can select more, PLEASE SELECT MORE if you have more than one language in your team.
Think of the directory from a new persons point of view a yellow pages of information they can access. If someone was in your area and wanted to learn more about your team, that information should be visable. They shouldn’t have to join a mailing list or an IRC channel just to find out where your wiki page is located.
Also a really handy tool for people who are travelling is they can view the LD and see if there are any events going on in the area so they can drop by and say hi.
After spending some time on wikpedia and learning a lot about other countries and their languages I was able to reduce the list to following 5
*edit: All teams are now listed under a country! including the 5 homeless ones above! See I won’t be beaten!
Original Source: http://www.lczajkowski.com/2010/08/22/loco-directory-useful-if-kept-up-to-date/
While I wouldn’t say that direct user support is one of my more substantial contributions to the Ubuntu community, I do contribute some in #xubuntu, #ubuntu-beginners and various not-strictly-support channels like some LoCo channels and #ubuntu-women. Doing user support on IRC is one of those things that makes me feel more connected with the community and requires essentially no commitment (you can start and stop at any time!) and I don’t mind parking my IRC client in a channel and glancing at it from time to time until I see a question I can answer and then take 5-10 minutes out of my day from to get someone on the right track.
As anyone who has done user support on IRC will tell you, there is some skill involved with asking good/smart/efficient questions (though I tend to shy away from the former two, since they imply that there are bad/stupid questions, which I’d argue don’t exist when someone is honestly asking for help). As such, I have seen dozens of guides over the years on the subject.
The community portion of help.ubuntu.com has:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GettingAnswers
Which links to the famous, if verbose and sometimes terse, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
While these guides are helpful (especially the latter for it’s in depth analysis of the subject), neither of them are the kind of thing I want to pass along to my impatient little sister when I’m trying to give her a quick rundown of how to get help in a way that will get her the quality answers she’s looking for quickly and take some of the investigation burden off the volunteers who are working to help her.
Now, thanks to the tireless work of Martin Owens, a friendly, charming and to-the-point guide exists! He blogged about it on Friday but I figured it was worth taking a more in depth look at and to display all the images in a single blog entry in case there were folks who felt less inclined to download the fantastic PDF – maybe this will convince them it’s worth it, or inspire someone to spruce up the Ubuntu Community GettingAnswers wiki page with some of his slides?
The following are licensed under the CC-BY-SA license by Martin Owens, and these images below are taken from revision 6 of the document, released on July 24, 2010.
Check out his blog entry from Friday here: DoctorMO.org: Asking Smart Questions and for the latest version, use the Direct Download link.
So, without further ado, the images from the pdf:
Thanks again Martin for writing such a great guide that’s such a pleasure to read!
Original Source: http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=3248
