GNU/Linux Matters blog

At the moment we are holding the first GNU/Linux Matters booth at the Rencontres Mondiales du Locigiel Libre (Libre Software Meeting).

It’s a great pleasure being here and a bit of a relief, too —we have been working hard over the last two months towards this, preparing printed material, equipment, travel and talks.

Our talk (”The Next Ten Million Users Won’t Have a Beard“) went well, our French visit cards are already gone, and T-shirts are selling well. 30°C peak temperature, storms while camping, and late night exchanges make the experience a little demanding but very exciting.

If you are around, come by for a talk and we’ll get you a drink!

Our organization has changed address, and slightly updated its bylaws. Although this is a formal announcement, there are no implications over our structure or activities —in practice, nothing has changed.

The legal address of the organization is now at 10 rue des Ormes, 91 540 Mennecy, France, off from Toulouse where we first established fifteen months ago.

During the (tedious) process, our bylaws have received a few modifications. As was discussed in our forum, we edited the procedure for general assemblies (once-yearly Association Committee meetings) and decision-making (internal voting process). Nothing else has changed. The change has been validated by formal committee vote on June 10th.

You can always download the bylaws at documents.gnulinuxmatters.org/bylaws. Please note that as per French law, only the bylaws in French are legally-binding.

Just when you thought such a topic as the choice of a web host should be trivial matter…

1. Get down regularly. It’s surprizing how patient and forgiving customers can be when they like you, so although once every fortnight is good, increase to once a week from time to time.
2. When servers are down, don’t always give customers notice. Some of them won’t notice.
3. Give server status information on your web panel (”rebooting”, “running”) that may or may not relate the actual server status.
4. Don’t always answer customer e-mails, especially when they contain attempts at providing useful information.
5. On big downtimes (two to three days), apologize mostly by blaming the guy whom you bought defective servers from. Congratulate your team for bringing the servers back online.
6. Just call small downtimes “maintenance”. Use phrases such as “servers will be ‘paused’ for thirty minutes” three hours before 2h-blackout.
7. Never automatically re-fund customers. But let them know that if they suffered losses they can ask¹.
8. —this is the killer step— Repeatedly pride yourself on being intransigent and top-of-market about customer service.

Epilogue:

I am sad to report that we have lost countless hours with server difficulties over the last six months. Gustavo especially has been bravely battling with our downtimes, while I was naively calling for his patience untill things would improve. They never did. I feel guilty about having wasted a lot of our precious resources.

This week we have begun migrating to a fine southern-hemisphere web hosting company and it feels like we’re leaving the town circus. Things are going fine so far, and we will happily make an announcement when we are done.
Our apologies go to all those who have been affected, in particular translators.

1. Non-profit organizations? Nah, they’re not really customers. [↩]