[business] Ægir Support Services

Wed Aug 19 02:44:12 EDT 2015

We appear to be in agreement that the Ægir Project should be offering
support directly. We ought to focus on the Ægir distribution itself,
including golden contrib. Support for the rest of contrib, or anything
custom, should be referred to member and partner agencies and consultants.
A finder's fee (10%?) on this referred work seems fair.

I rather like the simplicity (and pricing) of Proxmox's subscription model
<https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/pricing>. Basically, it scales on
the number of support tickets, the level of engagement (forum, portal,
SSH), and the scale of deployment (CPU count). The Best Practical RT
Support Model <https://www.bestpractical.com/services/support.html> is
similarly structured, but adds emergency and phone support at the top end.
Seeing as how Ægir already caters to both individual developers, and large
institutions, we'll probably want a blend of both models.

Tech support is a well-defined discipline that usually get's divided into 3
or 4 tiers
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered_technical_support>.
Since our goal is to help maintain and develop Ægir, the core team should
focus on tiers 3 (bugfixing) and 4 (re-factoring and re-architecture),
while coaching experienced tier 2 (troubleshooting) and first-line tier 1
(diagnosis) members.

My preference is for a cooperative business model, which would support the
independence of its members, but I'm open to other suggestions. I'm not
certain how or whether multi-national membership works here in Canada, but
I'll look into it, if there's interest. The alternative would probably be a
consortium, but I'm not very familiar with how they're structured. Either
way, we'll need some basic governance.

I also prefer to keep our internal operational overheads to a minimum. We
should simply subscribe to RT, Askbot, etc., thus supporting fellow libre
software projects whenever feasible. Contracting a bookkeeper, accountant
and other professionals, allows all workers to focus on our competencies.

Christopher Gervais  :|:  Principal,  Ergon Logic Enterprises
514.945.6442  :|:  christopher.gervais at ergonlogic.com

On 14 August 2015 at 19:03, Cameron Eagans <me at cweagans.net> wrote:

> I'm interested in taking smaller things as a freelancer. I don't work
> through a company for Aegir stuff.
>
> We might be able to solve the ticket allocation problem pretty easily:
>
> - Everyone goes into a queue
> - First ticket that comes in goes to the first person in the queue or they
> can refuse it
> - That person goes to the end of the queue and the next person gets the
> next ticket and so forth.
>
> Personally, I think it would be a good idea to sell support tickets
> through the Aegir project as a funding mechanism, rather than pass off an
> entire client. Maybe we (the project) could ask for some percentage of
> income generated from the support tickets?
>
> Cameron Eagans
>
> On 8/14/15 3:51 PM, Guillaume Boudrias wrote:
>
> 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 listbusiness at aegirproject.orghttps://lists.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/business-aegirproject.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> business mailing listbusiness at aegirproject.orghttps://lists.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/business-aegirproject.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> business mailing list
> business at aegirproject.org
>
> https://lists.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/business-aegirproject.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/business-aegirproject.org/attachments/20150819/e5ddf78c/attachment.html>