OLPC:Support gang

About

Community Support Volunteers deliver high-quality Tech Support to One Laptop per Child users worldwide. Our growing team of over 100 people meets in Cambridge, Massachusetts and by telephone for weekly calls. Begun in December 2007, we have an amazingly enthusiastic and deeply talented diverse team.

Join us

Do you have exceptional writing, technical and/or organizational abilities?

Are you naturally supportive and friendly towards those who are eager to just get started?

Do you demonstrate sincerity, appreciate an earnest team, and truly adore learning?

See our mailing list info page for directions on applying.

Tools

• IRC live chat!

• Our core support-gang mailing list (join our debates on improving real/friendly worldwide support!)

• RT ticketing system!

• Support FAQ / RTFM's - The core of our communications deliverables. So many requests to help@laptop.org and volunteer@laptop.org fall into a handful of categories (can I get a laptop, how do I activate my T-mobile account, etc) that we continually refine our library of clearest responses.
  • Reworking the RTFM response templates Support_Gang/RTFM

• http://forum.laptop.org

Recruiting

  A. RT/Tool Admin(s):  Seize the opportunity to build out real ToolSmithing
around worldwide OLPC Support.  Work closely with OLPC grassroots leadership
to drive our support community's workflow forward, scaling up from 100
proven volunteers towards 1000.

  B. Librarian:  Organize our exploding corpus of public and private Support
Documentation.  A literary, social, organized and driven volunteer would be
absolutely ideal.  Please all apply!

  C. Community Organizer:  Write regular public newsletters for our Support
Gang team, explain our successes, introduce new members, develop an online &
offline Social Network irrefutably demonstrating the rewards of participaction!

CONTACT: holt AT laptop.org including your phone number -- from anywhere worldwide.

Trips / BBQ

• Founder & coordinator Adam Holt visited almost 20 volunteers in early July 2008, driving from Boston to Chicago, Atlanta and beyond to meet with and understand the beating heart of OLPC.

• BOSTON BBQ COMING SOON SEPT 2008!!!

• West Coast & European trips forthcoming -- JOIN US

History

Our group is named "Support Gang" rather than just "Tech Support" as we support learning as well as technology, and are increasingly supportive of our growing base of 3rd World users who have tech-support needs quite different than those of (for example) the United States. While the majority of our members have core competencies that are more technically-based, we value strength through diversity and have educators, entrepreneurs, artists, and more, including people with no formal technical background whatsoever. All Support Gang(st)ers, however, are computer-adept and willing to learn how to use technologies they don't already know.