[ubuntu-uk] PLN! (for improving support)

[Matthew Daubney]

Yes, thats PLN, with a P an L and an N.

I've been a bit absent recently, for which I apologise, but shall
explain why in a moment. 

I have finally come to a plan for improving support and now need some
willing volunteers. There will be a small perk for those volunteers...
but more on that later.

What I would like to do is get a core group of support people together
to help spread the support love. If you have an expertise in a given
area that would be very useful too.

The purpose of this is to get people who need help with _difficult_
problems, which may not be easily solved by the groups general
knowledge, in contact with the person who might be able to help. This
does have a small time (and patience) commitment, but if you can help
act as third (or even fourth) line support, for a few people who have
difficult problems, or even mentor someone on an area (wireless, raid,
mythtv, video, and so on) that can help. 

I'm willing to throw resources and time at this (with a caveat, again
related to my absence) in order to get those volunteers the resources
they think they need. If you want to help, but think that the core team
need a voice chat server, I can supply that (thanks popey and dutchie
for helping me test that the other day). If you think we need some form
of jabber network or somesuch, I can supply that. 

What would be even better is if those volunteers can make a lot of noise
about any support they give. i.e. blog it, tweet it, make sure any
relevant info on the wiki is upto date, liase with various teams to get
bugs pushed and so on. Once whatever broke is fixed, it would be good to
get it onto the web and up the google rankings if possible

Now, I'd like to run a meeting in the second week of August about this.
Most likely the Wednesday or Thursday (please complain if you'd like to
help but that is not a good time). The reason for the delay is that I'm
getting married at the end of the month, so time is a bit of a
non-existant commodity for me until that week!

Now, perks...... apart from the obvious perk of being able to help
others and help give back to the community, any volunteer who turns up
to an OSS event that I happen to be at (say Oggcamp next year), there
will be all kinds of free cake. 

As always, I'm open to ideas, suggestions and volunteers :)

Thanks,

-Matt Daubney