What Support Should we Offer? Application vs. User

Attendees

David Wallom (facilitator) Tim Parkinson (scribe), Pascal Ekin, Phil Kershaw, Aaron Turner, Neil Chue Hong (first half).

Overview

OMII-UK wants to provide betters support for our users. There are two main strands to this break out. Firstly, it would be useful to discuss support experiences and see what kinds of support work and what kinds don't work. The second strand will look into the best ways of preparing support materials or organising support events.

The first session generated other topics so we did not really get around to discussing the second point.

Aims

The discussion went through the following points listed in more detail in the slides.

• Who Should We Support
• Specialist Applications
• Cost of Support
• Data Services
• Service Standards
• Use of Mailing Lists for Community Support

Conclusions

• Propose models of funding for institutional support
• Define and propose a way of funding a register of experts for specialised software (like Microsoft MVPs) and incentivise them
• Recommend that the DCC provide guidance during project setup on data access and organisation technologies
• Investigate the applicability of international standards (ISO9xxx series) for support services in institutions

Further work

As above. In addition, continue this session but with a DCC representative and one or more Research Computing Services representatives. In future sessions, address the second point in the original brief.