DoctorMo's Blog

Recently a number of well known people in the Ubuntu community got an interesting email from Ross Peoples, I’ve seen Ross comment on my blog before and I asked him if I could blog about his email and he agreed. In order to do this I have to show you the email:

Hello, my name is Ross Peoples and I have been using Ubuntu for about 4 years now, on and off. I love it and I am really hoping that it will begin to take off more in the mainstream. I am a very technical person and I usually can solve most problems myself, but every once in a while, I need a helping hand. Before I continue, I want you to know that I don’t usually send out cries for help, but I feel this topic deserves some attention.

I know of several resources that are provided for support of Ubuntu, such as the forums, the IRC channels, Launchpad, as well the
documentation. These resources are invaluable for your average user that needs some help getting their documents to open or their laptop to connect to a wireless network. In fact, I think that new users are well cared for, as there are other new users that had similar problems and are willing to help. My concern is not for new users, but existing users, such as myself. The questions I ask in the forums usually go unanswered, as do my IRC questions, and even my Launchpad bug reports can go years without being addressed.

To give an example, last week, I ran into a critical problem which I posted in the forums. In the week that has passed, I have gotten only a single response from someone who, I believe, genuinely wants to help, but cannot because he or she is not an advanced user, a developer, or a support member. This is generally my experience whenever I ask for help with Ubuntu. I feel that once you have
advanced beyond the status of a new, inexperienced user that you are truly on your own. There don’t appear to be any support options for someone like me, unless I just happen to know someone who is a Linux/Ubuntu guru.

I understand that the experts don’t want to be bothered by simple questions that could easily be solved by a quick Google search or
reading the documentation. I am a Systems Administrator by day, so if anyone understands the frustration of dealing with lazy users on a daily basis, it’s me. I like to think of the above mentioned support resources as Level 1 support. So my question is, “Where is the Level 2 support?” Where can I go to ask the Ubuntu experts for help? I am always looking for ways to help support the community and I do a fair share of helping new users when I can.

I would be more than willing to help set up an effort for a Level 2 type of support for Ubuntu to help those like myself, but I do not
have the expertise to answer the questions myself. I am also web developer, and could offer my limited coding skills to developing a
site for Level 2 support. If nothing else, I could provide the hosting and a domain name for such an effort. I am willing to devote the
resources to this effort, but I need help from experts such as yourselves.

So. Does the community need a better second line support? That’s the question.

The help I’ve gotten on the most advanced topics has predominantly come from programmers, if helps if your a programmer so you can decipher some of the programmer-speek as well as have some detailed understanding of the program your trying to work with.

A few times I’ve managed to get an advanced systems admin to give answers, but not as often. They are busy people after all.

The missing second tier support is probably just a mechanic of the people we’re dealing with. Good programmers and admins are much less likely to hang about in the ubuntu forums or in the #ubuntu channel. So the standard support channels don’t help, it’s true. I can’t remember the last time I went to the forums or #ubuntu and I’m community, more likely to help when asked.

Some have suggested that this is where paid for support comes in, to pay the geniuses and rock stars to give us the advanced support we need. That at the moment is certainly too expensive for most.

I suggest that we could do with educating more people. The user days and programmer days are great, do we need some advanced admin/user days too? Should we have more classes focused on giving members of the community the tools and knowledge to find out how to fix very complex problems? I think that’ll help, it’ll certainly help bring more people up to be able to answer higher level questions in the community.

Your thoughts?

I hear that there is still friction between the Ubuntu Manual team and the Ubuntu Docs team.

I can’t see why, the wiki documentation is a great resource and while it has problems that stem from it being a wiki system, it’s been useful to me and to a lot of people I know. The most important parts of it are kept up to date even though it’s been criticised for becoming out of date too easily and for people to be mislead easily into following guides for older versions by mistake.

On the other hand the Manual team is new, brand new and has all the passion of a bright and eager team that might be able to make some nice documentation for Ubuntu which should be fairly easy to share back to the wiki and the Docs team in general. The manual team is also concentrating on a definitive, narrow band guide to be published on release for new users to get to grips with Ubuntu. It’s non rolling release really separates it from the Doc Team’s work and is perhaps a drawback in our ever changing work. But I think as long as each manual release is very clearly labelled, they should avoid that problem.

But even if the two teams end up sharing 90% of their content, the production of the result is where the work is going to be. I mean I think that some content from docs and manual is most certainly going to end up in some of the learning team’s classes and visa versa, but there is work there in each team which isn’t relevant to it’s peers. I don’t expect docs or manual to write quizzes or demonstration lesson plans for teachers, nor do I really expect the docs team to write all the tools and organise the compartmentalisation that will be required to produce a self contained manual.

It’s also likely that the intonation and pacing of each document source is going to be different anyway, just because the expectations are going to be different. We’re planning for, in the learning team, on being able to pull data in from other sources, but we don’t expect to be able to pull it in with a simple automated copy. It’s expected that an editor will have to go through it anyway.

What are your thoughts? Is there too much duplication? Is the manual project a sub-section of the Doc’s Team work?

Great news, we’ve finished work on translating the excellent Chapter 03 of the Ubunchu Manga.

This chapter tells the story of our system admin club members negotiating their way through the Ubuntu Forums, will they find geeks replaying with RTFM posts or will they find a kinder and more helpful community. And why has Akane, our skilled hacker, never posted to a forum before?

You’ll have to download it to find out!