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getting-help.rst

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Getting help

It's important you know how to request support from the Open Knowledge sysadmin team. If your support request is made through the right channels with the right information included, it will get dealt with much more quickly than if it is not.

If you work for Open Knowledge

If you work for the Open Knowledge, you should email [email protected].

Please see below for a request template.

If you do NOT work for Open Knowledge

If you are affiliated with the Open Knowledge Foundation community (our Local Groups, Working Groups, Chapters, or similar) you should, in the first instance, email [email protected].

Please see below for a request template.

How to write a good support request

No matter who you contact in the first instance, you are much more likely to get a timely and helpful response if you ensure that you provide the right amount of information when submitting your request.

If you don't give us enough information, it make take a long chain of back-and-forth emails to understand what needs to be done. Given that system administrators tend to attend to support emails in short bursts between actually processing requests, this could dramatically extend the amount of time required to process your request.

In particular, it's important that you make the following clear in your request:

  1. Who you are and what project or group (if any) you represent,
  2. What you would like the sysadmin team to do,
  3. Any deadline for processing your request.

If you are requesting something which has non-trivial costs associated with it, please ensure you include the name of someone authorized to sign off on such requests, such as a Unit Head. Please not that we don't normally have any spare server/website capacity as we try to run as lean as possible

If you are reporting an outage or a technical problem, please also make clear:

  1. What you did or tried to do, in enough detail to be able to reproduce the problem.
  2. What you expected to happen.
  3. What happened instead. Include any relevant logs or screenshots.

You may find the following template useful when submitting your request:

Dear sysadmin,

Please could you <insert request here...>

  Group: (e.g. LTP, Knowledge, OKF Belgium, etc.)
  Project: (e.g. Open Data Index, CKAN, OpenSpending)
  Ideally done by:
  Must be done by:
  Cost code:
  Signed off by: (if you name someone, you must CC them)

Regards,
Joe Bloggs

You may of course omit any fields you do not see as relevant for your request.