OLPC:Support gang

About

Community Support Volunteers help answer emails and/or phones to provide basic, high-quality Tech Support to One Laptop per Child owners worldwide. Our growing team of over 50 worldwide volunteers meets in Cambridge, Massachusetts and by telephone, with roughly weekly calls. Begun in December 2007, we have an amazingly enthusiastic and deeply talented diverse team.

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-gangers, however, are computer-adept and willing to learn how to use technologies they don't already know.

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

• The support gang has a closed mailing list. This list is closed primarily for the purpose of protecting the confidentiality of materials shared by requestors who write into the RT helpdesk system. It is sometimes necessary to reach out to other support gang members to discuss how best to address the requests that come into RT and a closed list is a reasonable means of doing so, while protecting the private information of the requestor.

• RTFM - Many requests to the help@laptop.org address fall into a handful of different types of requests (can I get a laptop, how do I activate my T-mobile account, etc.). The RT system has the capability of providing templates for e-mail responses (to be customized by the responding support gang member) so that they do not need to be typed over and over again.
  • Reworking the RTFM response templates Support_Gang/RTFM