Discussion on the UKRiders mailing list lead me to investigate the use of Best Practical‘s Request Tracker (RT) to manage FreeCharity.org.uk’s help desk functions. Whilst I’ve been a user of RT for quite some time now, I’ve never taken a serious look at one extension, Request Tracker FAQ Manager (awkwardly known as RTFM). RTFM integrates with RT and allows you to extract and store useful information for later use in other tickets. As well as allowing you to quickly respond to common requests, you should find yourself documenting knowledge previously existed only in the mind of a single staff member. My experiences follow…
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There’s been a discussion on the UKRiders e-mail list about the similarities between Free Software and Fair Trade, started by a presentation Matthew Edmonson of Open IT Up gave at the UK circuit rider’s conference. Not only do I have a dislike for argument from analogy, since I feel things stand best on their own merits, but I can’t help but think this is too easy a comparison – comparing something we wish to promote with something that people already believe to be a good thing.
There are many similarities – Fair Trade helps to build the capacity of growers whilst Free Software levels the field for new developers with a capacity to build upon an existing body of work, but the discussion talks about the moral choices a buyer makes when choosing a fair trade or free software product. This misses the point. The moral concerns a buyer of fair trade products has are for the producer of their product whilst it’s the properties of our software, and our rights as users, that concern us as providers and users of software. We shouldn’t lead people to think that free software can make a difference to the lives of developers of proprietary software in the same way that fair trade does to growers in the third world. The best we can claim is that both involve a choice and a concern for people.
As users of Free Software we expect to be granted the freedom to do as we chose with our software as long as we don’t restrict what others can do with our derived software. As purchasers of Fair Trade products we expect a fair deal for growers and manufacturers.
(See also Beth’s Blog: Is Open Source Fair Trade for nonprofits)
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Many web designers try to work the presentation website too hard. Instead of accepting the limitations of the format, they continuously adjust their design and code to try and maintain an illusion of control over the precise presentation of their pages. The design often ends up complicated, fragile and difficult to maintain. Accept that your page may not appear exactly as you would like it, create a design that works well enough, and you can spend less time worrying and put your effort into other parts of your site.
Don’t make the mistake of using a more complicated and proprietary format than is absolutely necessary to present your information. Your readers want simple and quick access to information and anything that gets in the way of this – such as the downloading of a plugin to view a file – is off-putting. Don’t place information inside a Microsoft Word document when it can be just as well presented directly in a web page. If you do feel that you need precise control over the document’s presentation use a format such as Adobe’s PDF but remember
that not everyone has Acrobat installed.
Keep the number of formats used on your website to the minimum possible; preferably use nothing in your pages beyond HTML. If you do post word processor documents to your website be consistent about their use: don’t use a mix of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice formats, pick one and stick with it.
The most important lesson here is to think carefully about the use of a particular format: what are its weaknesses and strengths, why is it necessary and how will it impact your readers?
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