[business] Ægir Support Services

Guillaume Boudrias gboudrias at praxis.coop
Fri Aug 14 17:51:42 EDT 2015


I'm obviously interested as well, and I can commit in Praxis' name.

We've already committed to working on Aegir issues one day a week, so
I'd also be glad to be a part of a more sustained maintenance initiative
if we can make it happen.

I'm assuming we're talking about a sort of centralized support ticket
system here (and not really large support contracts) so correct me if
I'm wrong.

I foresee differences in how we want to implement the support plans, but
Praxis is still in the experimental stage in that regard so we can
probably shift to any reasonable way of doing things.

Another crucial point is how tickets will be distributed. I'm guessing
that most everyone involved will want as many support tickets as
possible, and we want to make the response time as short as possible
(which means we won't have time for debate). I don't have any specific
ideas on this point but to me it seems like the most sensitive one.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes,
-Guillaume


On 14/08/15 05:18 PM, Herman van Rink wrote:
> On 14-08-15 06:51, Christopher Gervais wrote:
>> The main takeaway from the Ægir Summit confab with Richard Stallman is
>> that we ought to be offering support to finance ongoing maintenance
>> and development of the project. "We" here being the Ægir Project
>> itself, whether directly or indirectly.
>>
>> This makes perfect sense. It should open up a market that has
>> heretofore been vastly under-served: commercial and institutional
>> users who have neither the budget to hire consultants, nor the spare
>> time, staff or desire to become experts themselves.
>>
>> Before, at and since the Summit, many project and community
>> contributors have talked about forming a consortium or cooperative to
>> offer such support. Let's agree to move forward with this, declare our
>> interest in participating and sort out how to proceed. I know that I'm
>> eager to see this move forward.
>>
>> I believe it is important to build the service around offering
>> support. This should, in turn primarily finance the generally
>> unappealing work of maintenance and documentation. Developers like to
>> work on cutting edge features, and consulting clients are often
>> willing to finance such work. However, fixing bugs, writing and
>> curating good documentation, code refactoring and cleanup are all very
>> difficult to justify spending IT budget on.
>>
>> Many active Ægir project and community contributors already offer
>> hosting and/or consulting services, including me. This endeavour must
>> not seek to undermine these established niches, but rather benefit
>> them by growing the market, and generating and referring /more/
>> consulting and hosting business.
>>
>> In fact, these very individuals and organizations, that already help
>> to drive the project forward, are the ideal participants in such a
>> venture. I invite all of them to join me in making this a reality. You
>> can start by declaring an interest to participate, and adding your
>> thoughts to this discussion. 
>>
> 
> 
> I'm in.
> 
> I do however value my independence.
> 
> A Support Services could set baselines about what a client could expect,
> while still leaving room to individual members to utilize their personal
> strengths.
> 
> The 'easy' way from our side would be to direct a new prospect client to
> one of the members, and let any contracts be directly between them.
> 
> For a client it might be more comfortable to get a contract with the
> project's support organisation where they don't have to care who does
> the work.
> 
> The last thing I would want is bad feelings between members, so we'd
> have to devise some clear guidelines on who is responsible for what and
> where the money flows.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Met vriendelijke groet / Regards,
> 
> Herman van Rink
> Initfour websolutions
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> business mailing list
> business at aegirproject.org
> https://lists.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/business-aegirproject.org
> 

-- 
Guillaume Boudrias
Praxis Laboratories Coop
http://praxis.coop

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