figure out how to ensure support coverage

[chadwhitacre]

Ping @pjf @patcon @bruceadams @clone1018 @seanlinsley et al.

Who is covering front line support this week? That's a question that I should know the answer to but I don't. Do we have an answer to that question already? Or do we need to come up with a process around this?

Assuming that you all aren't all ready on top of this, maybe we can use our Google Calendar and everyone takes a week at a time? What say you?

[patcon]

Yeah, we do need a way to coordinate this. I sometimes get tons of support energy, but I don't naturally do it all the time. I think that's partly a subconscious avoidance because I don't like the idea of the becoming a "support guy" when no one else is doing it.

Not that it solves it, but perhaps we could drop notifications into chat when support issues are created and closed. Thinking it might help people better understand when there's an imbalance...? Also, assigning weekly duty sounds good too :)

[chadwhitacre]

Implicit +1 from @biblyotheke on Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

@patcon I love the idea of having chat notifications for support events. Chatops ftw! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@patcon Since you and I are the ones currently working full-time on Gittip, want to alternate weeks for now? I'll take next week. I just added a "Support - Chad" event to the calendar for next week.

[chadwhitacre]

(Blech: https://github.com/gittip/building.gittip.com/issues/40)

[patcon]

I'm down -- just added myself for next week :)

Would be great to have a wider rotation, or rather, have support duty be more "something in the air" in our culture, but we can perfect that later!

[pjf]

I agree that having a dedicated calendar or roster would be great. I've been terrible at support, because I've been changing cities every week for the last six weeks. Things will probably continue in this fashion until September. This is awesome for me talking about Gittip (there's a talk at OS Bridge that I'm giving, and it'll be integrated into the OSCON closing keynote), but not as good for me doing support.

Having said that, pop me down for the 19-24th. :)

Also, today I learnt there was a calendar. :)

[pjf]

Or put me down on the 12-16th, either is fine with me. :)

(^^^ This may be a reaction to "Chad is doing support? No, we need him doing everything else!")

[patcon]

:)

I've bumped @whit537 off support for next week and you're in @pjf :+1:

[patcon]

Also, I shared write access to the caledar with you email. (the one you use for heroku.) (Related: https://github.com/gittip/roobot/issues/6)

[thatrubylove]

Ahh, the woes of scheduling engineers.I just hired a personal assistant myself.

Should I drop bug reports here then?

[patcon]

Thanks man :) Heh, well, you ideally shouldn't need to drop bug reports here, but it's true that GitHub is more "in our flow" for this sort of thing.

Thanks for opening #47, but this repo is for the meta stuff. I'll open one in the main repo, and we can work through it there.

[thatrubylove]

sure, close away then.

[pjf]

It'd probably make sense to transfer a "permanent" FreshDesk bit to whoever is doing support that week. I seem to recall I handed mine to @bruceadams before I went travelling. :)

[patcon]

@pjf Ah, that was me! But I need the admin access to do the notification stuff I'm doing today... I know it sucks to use up daypasses, but can you get done with those what you need to get done? (I'll try to wrap up with admin access today, and give it back to you tomorrow :)

[chadwhitacre]

Can we write this up as a BG policy doc?

[seanlinsley]

Not sure if this is the best place to mention it, but @ericmeltzer volunteered in IRC to help with support

[chadwhitacre]

Also dmk246. IRC

[chadwhitacre]

Basically I think we need to recruit and retain people who really love doing support. We should have engineers doing support, yes. But that's more for the engineer's benefit, tbh, and we're totally amateur hour right now the way we're letting support requests go unanswered for weeks at a time—no offense, please! Let's just take it as a sign that we haven't found the right system yet and keep working on constructive solutions. :-)

[ericmeltzer]

I think gittip's structure (lots of people helping out whenever we can) is actually really well suited to kicking ass at support. Let's all spend a bit of time every day having a look at the support queue! Also, where's a good place to start writing down an onboarding process for new support people? For example, how to do paypal payouts, how to do BTC payouts, etc.

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Chad Whitacre notifications@github.com wrote:

Basically I think we need to recruit and retain people who really love doing support. We should have engineers doing support, yes. But that's more for the engineer's benefit, tbh, and we're totally amateur hour right now the way we're letting support requests go unanswered for weeks at a time—no offense, please! Let's just take it as a sign that we haven't found the right system yet and work on constructive solutions. :-)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/gittip/building.gittip.com/issues/42#issuecomment-47038648 .

Eric Meltzer @wheatpond https://twitter.com/wheatpond http://theopencompany.net +1 408 874 6552

[seanlinsley]

A lot of the support workflow is documented here: http://building.gittip.com/howto/run-support

[ericmeltzer]

Ah, nice! Hadn't seen that. Reading now

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 6:39 AM, Sean Linsley notifications@github.com wrote:

A lot of the support workflow is documented here: http://building.gittip.com/howto/run-support

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/gittip/building.gittip.com/issues/42#issuecomment-47226419 .

Eric Meltzer @wheatpond https://twitter.com/wheatpond http://theopencompany.net +1 408 874 6552

[chadwhitacre]

Closing. We're pretty well on top of support right now. Basically, I have made it my responsibility to stay on top of our support queue, and others jump in as they have interest/time. Working for now.