Mi blog lah!

Free and open-​source soft­ware offers many chal­len­ging tasks for you to under­take. One of them is to answer ques­tions that new­bies ask.

Offer­ing sup­port to new­bies is chal­len­ging for sev­eral reasons:

• the prob­lem may not have been described reas­on­ably well
• you need to figure out the least amount of extra inform­a­tion you need, and ask easy ques­tions to the user to fill in the blanks
• you have to take con­trol of the dir­ec­tion of solu­tion and make sure the user fol­lows your steps correctly
• you have to put up with the occa­sional demand­ing user

Ubuntu offers a system that users can ask ques­tions and have volun­teers answer them. It is called Ubuntu Answers. Unlike forums, here you log in to your launch​pad.net account and simply write your ques­tion. You start off with a ques­tion title, and when you click Next, you are shown with poten­tial answers from pre­vi­ous ques­tions asked and are sim­ilar to yours. Really nice.

In order to motiv­ate people to con­trib­ute, Launch­pad assigns points for every answer you give, and more points for any answer that was marked that solved the prob­lem. This is the karma value of your Launch­pad account. There is a list of top con­trib­ut­ors for dif­fer­ent Launch­pad services.

Here are some direct links

• Cur­rent list of ques­tions (Open, Answered, Solved, etc). You can filter on the Open ques­tions only, and start answering.
• You can follow the list of ques­tions you are involved in from your Answers URL, as in https://answers.launchpad.net/~simosx
• You are a new user and by some reason you receive every single question/answer sent. Quite too many users get stuck in this. You need to reset the set­tings at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+answer-contact
• To view the solved ques­tions, visit https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu and filter to view only Solved ques­tions. It is good exper­i­ence to see how ques­tions are solved.

A tip to users asking ques­tions: it is good etiquette to respond to the answers that are given to you. There are cases that a ques­tion is answered but not acknow­ledged that it actu­ally solved the prob­lem. Due to this, the solu­tion does not appear when a someone else asks a new question.

What I recom­mend is to try out Ubuntu Answers. Either ask a ques­tion or help with answer­ing ques­tions. It is a good experience.

Tags: open-source, planetellak, ubuntu //