I don’t remember the exact details of how I first got involved with supporting Firefox. I know I started in #firefox (that’s an IRC channel, for those of you not familiar with the syntax) but I don’t remember if I’d just been hanging out in the channel, or if I’d actually had an issue myself that I got help with there. In either case, whether it started with a specific solution or not, I found myself able to answer some common questions that I’d seen answered before. That’s all it took.
When I answered the easy questions, it left the more experienced helpers – who were usually developers or extension authors pulling double duty to make sure users got support – free to take the harder questions or to spend more time working directly on projects. As myself and some other community members were around more often to help, some even took the opportunity to stop giving support regularly and quite wisely spent their time on tasks they were better suited for, like writing patches and creating new features.
The great thing about supporting Firefox is that if nothing else, either a new profile or a fresh install will solve the problem, or it’s caused by a third party app (there may be a few uncommon exceptions I’m forgetting here). A new install leaves all the user information intact, and settings can easily be moved between profiles. Eventually you start to get a feeling for which symptoms are going to be caused by a bad install and which are caused a broken profile simply by troubleshooting issues yourself. A while after that you’ll start to get a feel for which files specifically can cause which symptoms. So even though the old helpers were still around and available to help us if we got stuck, we were pretty well able to handle most issues and only ping them when we thought we’d found a bug that they’d want to check out.
For the most part, helping out on SUMO is going to be quite similar to my experience, users will learn from each other, and from reading the knowledge base, and some will even move on to contributing code and developing. However, Live Chat is one to one by nature. While users can always invite other helpers into a chat, or ask in the workgroup for help on issues they don’t know about, it’s harder for more experienced users to cut in if they know the answer to a problem. Because helpers aren’t watching each other help as much, it’s harder for them to get a head of the learning curve by learning from others’ experiences.
How to replicate this accelerated learning is going to be an interesting and very important problem for me to solve. I’ve already put some tools in place which I will blog about separately. This week I’m going to focus on monitoring chats and being around for helpers to ask me questions. I’ll take what I learn and figure out what areas our helpers could use the most help with, then work with our room monitors to figure out the best ways to give our helpers what they need. Of course we’ll constantly re-evaluate what we can do to help our helpers, and any suggestions are always welcome.