Dear friends,
As I mentioned in the most recent installment of the FreeSewing newsletter, we are spread too thin.
FreeSewing’s popularity and growth are cause for celebration, but at the flip side of that coin,
we struggle to keep up with everything that needs doing, despite our best efforts to do so.
So, we need to course correct and make some changes.
Changes that I was rather nebulous about when I wrote in our newsletter:
We will make an effort to grow horizontally, and remove or reduce bottle necks in our
team of contributors by spreading the workload over more people, building a bigger and stronger team of contributors, and in general try to meet the demands of a growing open source project by simply growing with those demands regarding infrastructure, maturity, and personnel.
It’s not that I was deliberately being vague here. It’s more that I needed time to figure out what we could do, and how we would do it.
Well, I’ve had some time, and it’s time to announce the first change to how we work: I would like to establish the FreeSewing support team.
But we already have a support team
We do, in the sense that many members of our community offer help and advice to others, whether that’s here on our forum, or on Discord, or in some other space. This informal support is wonderful, much appreciated, and this is not an attempt to undermine that or discourage it.
Much to the contrary, this type of support is already load-balanced among many people. It’s an example of what we need more of.
Only joost can read emails sent to support@freesewing.eu, let’s change that
As such, I am looking to similarly load balance our formal support among more people.
In practical terms, that means dealing with the people who write to support@freesewing.eu.
You see, most of the questions on the forum and discord are about how to use the site, what about this or that option, what’s good fabric for this or that design, and so on.
Questions that end up in our support mailbox or more along the lines of: I never got the signup email, or Help I’ve lost my password, and so on.
These are questions that require more than some understanding of FreeSewing and a willingness to help, they also require privileged access:
- Privileges to access the emails sent to support@freesewing.eu
- Privileges to lookup FreeSewing users based on their email address
- Privileges to impersonate those users to troubleshoot issues
- Privileges to send email from support@freesewing.eu
- and so on…
So when I say I want to establish a support team I am looking for people who are willing to take on a support role and help out with answering questions emailed to support@freesewing.eu. In other words: People to bestow those privileges on.
Comes with responsibilities, and tools
No, it did not take me two weeks to figure that out. What took some time however is building a backend system that grants you all those privileges above, or at least to those users who want to help out.
We have that now, in the form of:
- support.freesewing.eu where users with the
support role will be able to sign in here and read/answer emails sent to
support@freesewing.eu - freesewing.eu/admin where users with the
support role will be able to lookup FreeSewing users here, and check the
status of their account.
We might extend this with more features in the future, but this is what we’re starting with.
Obviously, with great power comes great responsibility and all that. I hope we can all agree that being granted access to the personal data of a couple of hundred thousand people is something you should take seriously.
Apply below
If you would like to be part of FreeSewing’s support team, please comment below to let us know.
We’ll need to hammer out some guidelines about how to handle all this stuff, but that we can figure out together.
So for now, who’s with me?
love,
joost
PS: There might be other teams in the future. This is what we’re starting with.
