<div>On 2/12/08, Guillaume Beaumont <<a href="mailto:guizzy@gmail.com">guizzy@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alexandre Vassalotti wrote: | On Feb 11, 2008 9:59 PM, Brian Michalski <<a href="mailto:michalski.7777@hotmail.com">michalski.7777@hotmail.com</a>> 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - <a href="http://enigmail.mozdev.org">http://enigmail.mozdev.org</a> iD8DBQFHsWO5XfND7XljbwURAq2sAJ4mzbLui3Swy9CgxRz3av7DTjtnvQCgl1Ov g28CJJeMfSW39anaFpFzIME= =5Lf/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Ubuntu-helpteam mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-helpteam@lists.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu-helpteam@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-helpteam">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-helpteam</a> </blockquote></div> +1 Beaumont.. and we should have a wiki page defining our goals and activities firstly, and secondly is we need an irc channel to discuss on answering of questions Improving the quality of support on Launchpad, (Remember ubuntu forums is also there for support) and to meet up on a regular basis to ensure quality support and discussion of new Ideas if any, Cheers, -- Bhavani Shankar.R <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bhavi">https://launchpad.net/~bhavi</a>, a proud ubuntu community  member. What matters in life is application of mind!, It makes great sense to have some common sense..!