Tag: Help Desk

Improvements to Largo Support Process

Posted on by Jack Brighton

We love helping people get the most out of their Largo sites. As we have more sites using Largo we occasionally have to make changes to how we provide this support.

The help desk system we’ve been using has proven to be a bit confusing and not as flexible as we would like so we’ve decided to make a switch.

Starting this week, and officially launching May 1st we’ll be launching a new support portal at http://support.largoproject.org.

The new portal includes the ability to create new support requests and adds a knowledgebase of answers to common questions and a community forum to ask questions, propose new features and share success stories with other Largo users.

This change does mean you will need to create a new account. But you can also still open a new support request by emailing support@largoproject.org.

We’re also in the process of revising and expanding the Largo Project documentation, and developing new training resources to answer common questions about setting up and running a Largo website.

The preferred process if you need assistance with your site is as follows:

  1. Visit support.largoproject.org and search the knowledgebase and/or public forums to see if your question has already been answered (many questions come up time and again and we’ll try to have answers ready to go for you for as many of these issues as possible).
  2. Site administrators or developers may want to also consult the Largo documentation and editors and authors might want to reference our Largo users guide.
  3. If you’re still unable to find an answer to your question and require further assistance. Just open a new ticket and we’ll do our best to help.
  4. In some cases if you request is going to require more one-on-one assistance or custom work we may ask you to pay for this work to help us cover our costs. You can learn more about our consulting services here.

We hope these changes help you to get the most out of your Largo site. If you have questions or suggestions for us, feel free to reach out anytime.

Thanks for using Largo.

What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt You…Unless You Don’t Ask

Posted on by Jack Brighton

We were talking with a respected INN member during the Nerds’ open office hours last week. While asking a question about how to do something on his site, he said a couple of times that he doesn’t know much about website coding. But it struck me that he clearly does know a lot, he just didn’t know the answer to this particular question.

I have seen this behavior in many other people, and also in myself. When talking with people we believe know much more than us about a given topic, we sometimes minimize our knowledge up front.

I suspect we do this because we have learned from past experience that people sometimes use their status as experts to belittle us. This kind of behavior is common, especially in technical fields. Saying “I don’t know much” is a smart strategy if we suspect the expert will act like a jerk in response to our question. For many of us it's a defense reflex.

I can safely say that none of the INN Nerds will ever treat you this way. We welcome questions from all members and constituents from any level of technical knowledge, and it’s in our DNA to not act like jerks.

Not acting like a jerk is also hard-coded in the INN technology team manifesto, which outlines how and why we work. We hold ourselves accountable to this, and you should, too. Here are a few excerpts:

  • We’ll invest in education: creating curriculum and training for members, investing in our apprentices/students, and pursuing continuing education opportunities for ourselves.
  • We will be open to new tools and processes, resisting the stale comfort of “this is how we’ve always done it.”
  • We won't use snark or pedantry to exclude people from conversations.
  • We’ll never judge you or shame you for not knowing something.
  • We won’t feign surprise or jump into conversations with “Well, actually...”
  • In emergencies, we will send pie.

Because news technology is changing so rapidly, there are many reasons for each of us to feel we don’t know as much as we should. The pace of change is also precisely why we should ask many questions, even at the risk of exposing what we don’t know. Our guest during office hours did exactly that, and deserves to have his question (and his many other contributions as a professional) treated with respect. We will always do that.

When it comes to the web and digital technology, each of us is somewhere on the learning curve. The value of a community like the one we’ve got is that we can help each other gain the knowledge we need to improve and sustain our work. At a time like this, we should make extra efforts to communicate and collaborate.

So please use the Largo Help Desk for any site problems or requests, email us at nerds@inn.org for anything general, and sign up any time for open office hours. We’ll never shame you for not knowing something, and might even have some dumb questions ourselves.