[sclug] Community Support

[Martin Summers]

I would guess my main reasons would be:-

1) Helping someone out with a problem often helps me learn something new: As
technical support plays a big part of my professional career, being able to
use those skills for something a bit different does help you learn it very
well. Often the person you are trying to help can teach you a thing or two
about the area in which the problem occurs (.. and that's the bit that does
not often happen so often if you are doing tech. support professionally...)

2) Social interaction and a different balance: Usually, when someone is
asking help for "free", the way in which people interact is a lot more
friendly and probably a better "ideal" tech.support  and user relationship
than the "professional" world of tech support. (i.e your customer base is
getting  tech. support from you because they are paying your company for it,
and that can lead to a lot of  non-technical issues why the technical
problem is apparent)
This is not always true, but with the free stuff, you can always walk
away....its on your own terms.

3) Technical pride - In my humble opinion, I think techies/engineers have a
lot of pride when it comes to fixing problems or finding solutions to
engineer their way around something. I think for this to work well, there
has to be other people who observe that the help occurred.

That's my 2 pence worth !

-Martin Summers




On 2 June 2010 23:00, Matthew Daubney <matt at daubers.co.uk> wrote:

> Hello All,
> I've been lurking a bit for a little while on this list, but have
> started to ask questions on other lists and wondered if anyone would
> mind answering the questions I'm asking elsewhere. I've just moved into
> Tilehurst, so if I can get leave from the missus, might pop down and say
> hello one day when you're meeting.
>
> My question is this, What drives you to help support random strangers on
> Linux for no reward?
>
> I'm on a drive to try and improve community support (specifically in
> Ubuntu at the moment, but these things tend to spread, and I hope they
> do) and I think understanding peoples motivations is the key to
> achieving this.
>
> Thanks for any response,
>
> -Matt Daubney
>
>


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