pingy yes? hey i was wondering if you had some time now for an interview - the fedora design team is interview representatives of various parts of the project to help work on our target audience definition / personas ah. Well, not right now. In the middle of day job work. but later I could. okie dokie what time would be best? in an hour or two? anytime after that oh okay great ill ping you then :) ok. I'm waiting for a client call back, but otherwise around now... so, if it doesn't matter if I have to stop if I get a call, I'm around. ;) hey you around now? yep. cool you want me to drop over to fedora-design or something? no here is fine ok. fire away. so, im interested in interviewing you wrt end user help in fedora do you interact with a lot of end users seeking help? ok. Happy to try and answer as best I can. yes. okay great so when i ask you these questions keep in mind the experiences you've had trying to assist end users so my first question is a little long the fedora project has some stated goals the mission statement is The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community. and the specific sub goals of that are as follows: * The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow. * The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and spread free/libre code and content. * The Fedora Project succeeds through shared action on the part of many people throughout our community. keeping those goals in mind, and keeping in mind your interactions in assisting end users how well do you think Fedora is achieving those goals right now? and in what areas does it need development? well, those are pretty sweeping goals... ;) I think we are doing 'ok' but can always do better. areas for development: Many folks want spiffy 3d bling, and our X drivers are just starting to catch up. We need to keep improving in this area to keep users from using non free blobs. do the users seem to value bling over freedom then? I think we could do better coordinating our support offerings... fedoraforum/#fedora/fedora-list seem to just be doing their own things, and could help have a unified front for users. in the case of Display drivers, many do, yes. do you have any examples of when a breakdown occurred because of fedora forum / #fedora / fedora-list doing their own thing? are there different people helping out in each one and they don't branch out to the other two? yeah, the pool of helpers is different in each... so you may get different answers from each. interesting do you know why they're separate? are people tied to the medium (irc / mailing list forum) or do they simply not have time / interest in participating in more than one? of course it's hard to coordinate something like that since each is a community effort... so anyone from the community can help where they like and answe the way they want. do you know which one is more popular with end users? I think it's both... some people like email, some forums, some irc... and some just have time for the one they like best and not the others. ah okay do you have any idea how our support measures up with other distros? no idea off hand. ;( do people ever complain that we suck (or commend that we rock :) )compared to other distros? Some, but it seems very small... not many people mention other distros support that I have seen. I don't know if thats good or bad. :) which of the support forums are you most affiliated with? irc. I do occasionally respond to the list/forums, but usually lack time. From an end user perspective, another thing we might do better at is communicating our life cycle. are people in each (irc/mailing list/forum) familiar with the helpers in each one? eg do you have contacts who work in the forums or on the mailing list who you're familiar with? we get a fair number of people running EOL releases looking for support. ah interesting a few on the mailing list... no idea on the forums. once they find out its EOL, are they typically willing to upgrade or does it bother them to have to upgrade? usually on irc at least they are 'I need to fix this/install this now, I don't have time to upgrade' do you still try to help them or does the conversation end there? some few are ok to upgrade, they just didn't know they needed to. it seems like most are against upgrading then the policy we have currently is that we would help them to upgrade, but not assist with the eol/non supported release issues. Of course if it's something easy we can tell them that. at least point them to the archive if they are looking for a package. does the mailing list (and forums if you know) have a similar policy? The list seems to have a similar policy... not sure on the forums. I'm sure there are other places for improvement, but thats all my brain is coming up with right now. okay cool so then my next question is well it relates to the fedora target user ok so the board has created a working definition of what kind of user we should target for fedora * nirik nods. im going to copy paste that definition wait for the flood lol 21:07:38 (1) May or may not be aware of FOSS but is interested in trying a change of operating system voluntarily. 21:08:11 (2) Is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer. They're comfortable and successful at ordering products online. For full HDD installs, they own the computer and have permission to overwrite the HDD. 21:08:34 (3) They are willing and able to communicate about their experiences with Fedora. Filing bug reports, making blog posts, going to events, etc. 21:08:49 (4) Wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser. yep. does this make sense to you? does it mesh with what you've seen in #fedora and on the mailing list? yeah, to some extent. There are always other types of users... I think irc tends to attract more technicnical folks for help... so considering this definition of who we're looking to target for fedora we might be able to change that a bit by making it easier on the default setup to go to #fedora. (ie, a 'get help now' button of some kind) are there any questions the design team could research about the users to help folks like you help fedora users for example if we surveyed a group of users in the target, we could find out how much irc vs mailing list vs forums are preferred and that could maybe help you organize / prioritize which help forum is listed first for example yeah, so questions we could ask that would help us help people? exactly and depending, the design team coul dgo out and run surveys or interviews or usability tests, etc and find the answers for you yes, which avenue they would seek help from first would be good to know. * nirik ponders. are there typical questions you always ask them when they come in for help that might be useful to know on a large scale? Perhaps what their expectation would be seeking on-line help... ie, how much interaction/help would they expect? thats a good one well, usually we ask for them to be more specific. Most of the time people come in and say something like: "trying to install fedora 12 here and it fails" maybe we could ask them for examples of what volunteer help they have used in the past that worked really well and get some ideas for improvement there yeah, thats a good one. another one often is: someone asks something very very specific... but really thats not the solution to their issue. So, we need to ask them 'what is your high level goal here, what are you trying to do' but not sure how that would translate into something to ask them in a survey. ;) right, like they're trying to use inkscape to edit a photo when gimp is what they want :) well maybe we could ask them what they use their computer most for or what they have the most problems with? yeh thats better we could ask them, when a problem happens, what are the first steps you take? and/or perhaps: at what point would you go to a on-line help to solve a problem? there might be steps they take before they ask for help from someone else exactly yeah. what would they do before they go to online help the more things they try before they get to you, the more irritated they will be probably :) we also get a lot of things where the answer to someone is an exact google lucky search. ;) since they've tried things and they didnt work yeah... true. heh maybe have a ui in fedora get help and have it with a prebaked '+fedora +12 +x86'or whatever query hidden, and they type something like, 'can't get email' and it searches for the full string lol another question: How important is a help/support channel? (of any kind). If you got mad after using it, would that cause you to reflect poorly on fedora? I guess thats poorly worded. oh thats a good one yeah, we talked about setting up some kind of lightweight ticket system... but never have yet. and it might be too much overhead. if it could be so simple as messaging an irc bot to open and close tickets it might be little overhead i think we have bots right now that interact with the fedora hosted trac system yeah, hard to say... most people want instant answers from irc... Oh another one: Would you consider helping on a support channel? irc/emaillist/forum? if no, why not? oh thats a really good one or is that too open ended? no it's not its definitely a good on ramp to becoming a contributor and thats one of our goals there's likely more... just running low on steam... it's nearly dinnertime here. ;) lol it's all good thank you so much this is very helpful what we'll end up doing is go through all the questions and ocme up with a research plan and ill make sure we send you a copy so if you think of any others we can record them cool. excellent. yay any further questions for now? nope that's it :) thanks a bunch!