From: Justin Mason (jm@jmason.org)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 05:19:26 PST
Tom Whore said:
> So i put out a call for helpers. I got 6 folks to break the main group
> into several smaller groups. All I do now is make sure those 6 folks have
> the seed cds and a few list adminy things.
> (www.egroups.com\group\otree)
> The moral of the story is that had I treid to handel the whole support
> issue myself I would have gone ape shit. Instead i let the worth of the
> concept carry the users to want to support it with some help from me for a
> few issue.
That sounds like a great system!
I think it also depends on the population of your user group.
For example -- PLP, being a network printer spooler system, was mostly used and
installed by sysadmins, whereas my current projects are more end-user (well,
techie unix-using end-user) oriented.
The former were more motivated to get it to "fit" into their network setup,
generally because they wanted to replace a broken printing system (this was the
early 90s, proprietary UNIX printing systems were really crappy). They also
wanted the stuff installed and working, so fixing it themselves with the source
was better than waiting for me to get around to it. So patches came thick and
fast.
The latter aren't quite as bothered; it's only a cool app. So suggestions
for new features -- but no code -- is more common ;)
I think your group works well because they're very motivated about the data
being traded.
> As an app or process creator the real trick is to Tom Sawyer the support.
I like that -- it's the perfect term for it ;)
...actually, "Tom Sawyering the support" has another aspect -- if a company
puts their support documentation up on the web, their customers will help
themselves. A web-based "knowledge base" or set of FAQs is the first thing I
look for when buying commercial software.
The marketing dept usually hates it ("argh, our competitors/reviewers/customers
can find out about bugs in our products"), but the support people love it 'cos
it cuts down on the crap calls they get, cuts down on their workload, support
turnaround time improves, and the support costs go down. It's a Cluetrain
thing I guess!
--j.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 12 2001 - 07:55:03 PST