Luckily the article has done a lot of good, the developers, and some staff from projects are now starting to put things into motion
A big list can be found here
There is also talk of a manned 24hr help desk for BOINC staffed by volunteers, using Skype
Note all these ideas are just that (ideas) at the moment, some may happen some may not new things will probally come up along the lineI really like Bruce's idea for a 24-hour hot line, and the technology exists to make it work.
Let's flesh it out a little:
1) We'll make a web page, boinc.berkeley.edu/support/
2) Volunteers will register at this site. They supply:
- what language(s) they speak
- what hours they are typically available
- what BOINC projects they are most familiar with
- their Skype ID and email address
They also have to read some material about how to do customer support, and they have to sign up with an email list for support volunteers
3) Users needing help go to the site and pick their language.
They see a page of links to volunteers that speak that language.
These links show whether each volunteer is currently online;
clicking on the link initiates a Skype call to the volunteer.
Here's a mockup:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/support.php
(Skype provides a nice mechanism for doing this; see
http://www.skype.com/share/buttons/index.html
Maybe we can think of a mechanism where, if no volunteers are online,
the user can request a call at a later time.
4) The user and volunteer converse and resolve the problem
5) Possibly have a feedback mechanism where the user can say how helpful the volunteer was (1 to 5 stars).
6) We have to figure out what happens if the volunteer can't solve the
problem;
we need to eventually give the user a solution,
or tell them that there is none.
Technical note: volunteers would create a separate Skype ID for this.
It's possible to run 2 instances of Skype at once, with different IDs.