Tech Support Plan

Mission

The mission of Free Geek's tech support program is to further the mission of Free Geek as a whole by ensuring the usefulness of the refurbished systems that Free Geek rescues from the waste stream. Tech support does this by repairing systems, configuring systems for special uses, replacing defective systems and by educating end users about the capabilities of the system.

Stakeholders

I created this image as part of the volunteer management class to illustrate the different stakeholders in the tech support process, but actually it leaves out one of the important stakeholders, and that is the techs themselves who provide the actual work and get out of it a combination of experience, an enjoyable (for them) way of giving back to the community, and a boost for their resumes. I always enjoy being able to give a recommendation for a past or present volunteer tech.

The current situation

Coverage

This is a moving target. Right now, the tech support hours are mostly covered by volunteers. The coordinator needs to do actual tech support only when volunteers fail to show up or when there is a large backlog. Recently, some of the volunteers were moved to morning schedules so that at the beginning of the year, there will be full coverage (noon to 6, actually) on wednesday, friday and saturday. We may also have tuesday morning covered. This leaves thursday mornings still uncovered, but also leaves little room for error if a tech doesn't show up. The current (regularly updated) tech support intern schedule can be seen here.

Record-keeping

Tech support issues are tracked in RT in the support queue. In addition, each box as it comes in gets a work order form attached to it, which includes contact information and info about the box and its issues, as well as a list of any additional items that were left.

Knowledge Base

Regularly occuring issues and their solutions are kept on wiki pages. The full list can be seen by checking out Category:Tech support. These pages are mostly written by the techs who come up with the solutions and sometimes go out of date with changes in the distro we support. There is still a fair amount of information that gets shared by the techs that has not gotten into the wiki pages, and that is a continuing responsibility of the coordinator to prompt for those solutions to get recorded.

SWOT

This diagram was created for the 2007 plan, but is still applicable.

Change Tech Support as necessary to support build, adoption and sales in a changing tech market

	Good (for Free Geek)	Bad (for Free Geek)
Internal (to Free Geek)	Strengths: Strengths are advantages we have that are internal to Free Geek and helpful to achieving the objective. (Good things we do.) We create the boxes, so we have the ability to modify production specs and installed programs We can always replace boxes with difficult problems	Weaknesses: Weaknesses are problems we have that are internal to Free Geek and harmful to achieving the objective. (Things we do poorly or not at all.) Tech support must often make up for the adopters (buyers) lack of linux knowledge Quality control can be iffy, resulting in extra work for tech support and a bad experience for the adopter
External (to Free Geek)	Opportunities: Opportunities are advantages we have that are external to Free Geek and helpful to achieving the objective. (Good things that will or could happen to us.) The Linux distros are constantly improving, making it possible to give the adopter a better experience with less work More and more people are interested in actually using the OS we put on the box	Threats: Threats are problems we have that are external to Free Geek and harmful to achieving the objective. (Bad things that will or could happen to us.)

See also Trends and Attributes | What do we want to do?