Tech Support Plan 2007

This is a draft of a new or in-progress document, and is likely to have a few people specifically working on it. You may wish to check in on the discussion page to see what the purpose of the document is and who's working on it; then feel free to give this article love and attention if have extra of those things.

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Intro

How will Free Geek's Tech Support Program change over the next 3-5 years so that Free Geek can better fulfill its mission and live up to its principles?

State of the program

Currently Tech support is open four days a week for 3 hours a day, and provides general support for people with adopted or granted freekboxen less than one year old. In addition, initial support is given for store boxen and paid support is available for store boxen after the first issue. Issues supported include network connectivity (dialup and broadband and wireless), hardware problems, program installation, user knowledge...

Current and past issues

There are several issues with maintaining the Tech Support program

• Keeping up with the changes in the specs and distribution.
• Acquiring new techniques for satisfying increasingly sophisticated adopters, especially for multimedia
• Maintaining good boundaries against requests that do not further our goals (i.e. MS Windows support)
• Finding and keeping good volunteers and encouraging them to learn more

Trends and predictions

Tech support will continue to be an important part of Free Geek, no matter what happens. In the past, many of our computers were switched to MS Windows as soon as they were taken home, but as time goes on, more and more of our boxes are being used as linux computers. I expect this trend will continue regardless of any expansion or reduction of Free Geek as a whole. Further, in the likely event that we continue to expand, the number of adopters and purchasers will continue to expand, resulting in more need for basic tech support. This will result in the need for more hours dedicated to tech support, and eventually a need for more than one person paid to do it.

SWOT

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?