Matt Daubneys Blog

If anyone doesn’t already know, I’m on a push to see if community support can be improved. When I gave a talk at Oggcamp on this, someone suggested that the solution might become more apparent if I could understand what drove people to help support others.

I’ve sat and thought about this for a couple of weeks now, and as I sit here with a mug of tea mulling this over a bit more I think this is actually a very hard question to answer. I think it boils down to the following.

I help other people because I dislike feeling useless, and the people I look up to in the community helped me feel less useless by providing that support when I was learning.

I have a terrible habit of projecting my own feelings onto others. If I feel useless about something, then without thinking, I believe that other people would feel the same way. Due to the way I felt in that position, and how I that was solved. It seems fair to me that I do the same for others as others had done for me.

Now, that is my view, what I really need to know is why other people support new users. What is it that drives you and what could be done to help encourage people to improve the way in which they support others.

Please, please let me know. The more data I can collect, the better the solution I hope I can present back to the community to help improve things.

It’s been etched into my diary now, so I’m going to both Lug Radio Live 2009 and Oggcamp. Both of these will be quite exciting for me as they’ll be the first large scale linux events I’ve been too, however judging from the general community populace, both should be quite friendly and cool!

I’ll be travelling up to wolverhampton from the Newbury/Reading area, so if anyones heading up from that area as well, let me know and see if we can organise some kind of lift share. Hope to see a lot of you there!