hello guys..

[Guillaume Beaumont]

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Alexandre Vassalotti wrote:
| On Feb 11, 2008 9:59 PM, Brian Michalski <michalski.7777 at hotmail.com> 
wrote:
|> But Isn't the help team supposed to be a team dedicated to the 
(semi-)professional aid in the answering of questions?
|
| You are right on it. The original idea, behind the helpteam, was to
| provide peer training to the people who offers free support. However,
| I never had the opportunity to push this idea any further ever since
| my Google Summer of Code last year.
|
| -- Alexandre
|
I might be ambitioning, but I see a bigger potential role for the help team.

While I recognize there is a need to train people offering free help, I 
think there's overlap here with two other parts of the Ubuntu project; 
the documentation team takes care of writing help and tutorials (and 
quite frankly, if we're going to write documentation for support, we 
might as well make it for the user himself). And then there is also the 
official certifications; LPI and Ubuntu specific ones. What's left is 
writing general pointers about how to do give support for to get 
non-professionals to understand the process. I don't think there's much 
more than one quite short document to be made about this.

What an official help team COULD offer, however, is voluntary support 
that goes beyond the Answers tracker. Perhaps even live support, with 
voice-chat (Ekiga), and even remote control if necessary (and accepted 
by the user).

Of course, this would require strict control of membership to the team, 
probably signed GPG keys with identity checks, and ample disclaimers 
(that while the person offering support is trusted by the Ubuntu 
community, they are still basically letting someone control their 
computer, and that no one can be held responsible should anything happen 
to it and its data).

Guillaume Tremblay Beaumont
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