Yeah, then maybe we have to vote on questionsā¦
But I think it is fair to ask people to talk to the n-th; meaning that people take an 1/nth part of the time of the amount of people taking part in the discussion.
Yes. But sometimes answers only Fairphone can give are missing. So it would be nice to gather those. I try to find a few patterns and wrote down questions related to these issues. Most people have issues with the (1) support or their (2) phones. Often (2) seems to bring down (1).
I donāt know the reasons, but it would be nice to know them. I donāt want to start a discuss about AMA rules, but the idea of an AMA was normally to get clear answers to best rated questions.
If you read reddit from time to time, you will see that this is not always working. Also reddit tried to push AMAs more to make money rumors say ā¦ most of the twitter āwarsā and honest and open āAMAsā from celebrities on the net are just plain fake, created by their PR agents. But as said, not really looking to discuss AMAs her, just trying to give some background: Clear answers to best rated questions. No weasel wording.
Not sure how to answer this one, but it doesnāt look like a question, so I guess I donāt have to.
Yes indeed it is nice to gather those and it is also good to learn about other peoples experiences with AMAs: see what works and what doesnāt.
The thread on discourse shows that also the forum software itself has its limitations as it seems with these kind of events.
I just wanted to make sure that people should not expect all pre-gathered questions will also be answered. Some of the ones you asked will involve multiple team members, research and feedback from third parties; an amount of work we canāt deal with at the moment.
Therefore an AMA limited to the expertise of the person giving it, limited to the time we set for it, might limit the quality and depth of answers, but also makes the AMA possible to do in the first place.
I see it more as an open chat for all to join, then a moment where new documentation is written.
Still, I must say some of your questions even tickle my curiosity and I hope that they will get an answer one day.
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We now scheduled the AMA for Thursday 11 august from 17 to 19 Amsterdam time
Iād like to propose the following:
- We do it live (no question gathering, preparing or answering upfront)
- We ask people to only ask one question (and maybe a clarifying question on the same topic if the answer is unclear or incomplete)
- We run it for two hours.
- We limit the questions to the expertise of the person of the AMA (so no Value Chain questions for @anon48893843)
- The first person will be @anon48893843, our support team leader.
What do you think?
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Sounds reasonable and fair, so everyone gets a chance. But I hope there will be a second round possible if thereās still time and questions left, after everyone had his or her turn. 
Btw: i think it is great that it will be in the evening!
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I have the feeling that a lot of people will not get their questions answered. But lets just try and complain later. 
I agree with @freibadschwimmer, the evening is the right time to do this.
Here is a link to @anon48893843 biography. Thank you for being the first!
Although I think heās not the right person for this first AMA (he is currently ājustā the face of support answering unanswered tickets that show up in the forum as unanswered ā¦ often late at night! Thanks for that, btw.). But Iām not sure if he can tell us a lot about the root cause of the support problems? Is this still his expertise? But I guess we will find out. I would have expected the Technical Support Representative to answer the first AMA. But I guess itās a PR thing, at least itās someone who is already known in the forum. And he also wrote a blog post about QA related stuff a while ago so he will know about QA. 
āFinally, based on the experience of the Fairphone 1, we now have access to our own repair statistics which allow us to make more accurate assumptions and estimates.ā
One AMA related question: Will āupper managementā - people with āChief/Seniorā in the job description get involved in later AMAs as well? They donāt show up here in the Forum that ā¦ often. I also would like to discuss much more often with the value/supply chain crew.
Update: Blog entries written by @anon48893843. Maybe this will help asking good questions.
How we are fixing the spare parts supply chain so you can repair your Fairphone
Weāre sorry to keep you waiting: an update from Customer Support
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Hey, thnx for your (critical) notes. As always
Of course we never said that root causes will be the topic of the first AMA. The issues at support and the questions people have in regard to their own device seem to be more the focus of this AMA.
Iām sorry if I gave room for that expectation. I canāt recall where I did, but this was never the plan. If this proofs fun and successful I surely hope that we can have more and people from various teams do AMAās; always answering the questions in the field of their expertise.
Also if you have any other āformā suggestions to make this first AMA a succes; please share
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Let me try a fair answer to these several quotes
Since you start AMA with leader of support team Michiel_S I learned from you that more AMAs may follow if fun is proofed (?). @anon48893843 to be honest , how much fun do you expect personally ? I am not sure what comes out if fun is expected by this. But anyway if he wants it by his own free will and it is not only a company decision for him I will give of course a chance . And I would be really happy if just Michiel would get even a second chance for second AMA. However I have no hope to get through with my question if support questions are at first. Just because for the moment I am lucky not depend on FP support
This would be my proposal: Only those who just painfully need support should ask questions. Letās see how fast 2 hours pass or time flies. I sacrifice my tries for free to other customers. Because my questions of course aim more to the root of the support problems I am sorry to decline from it . But I am a quiet and fair listener and really curious what happens.
One reason I am so quiet is that I am stunned that just technical representatives and other higher representatives are excluded right away from the start. The selection mentioned here are people from FP with direct or indirect contact to customers or suppliers. So we cannot learn directly much news about the product FP2 itself. Unusual for a revolutionary design after 6 months and so many enthusiastic experts in the audience due to technical design.
I cannot see any critical note from @fp1_wo_sw_updates . Maybe more enthusiasm or even fun was expected.
After 2 weeks and 14 answers here on this topic and me as the only contributor to fp1_wo_sw_updates wiki about it I cannot find many other contributors to your topic. Really, Douwe, I feel sorry about this good idea from FP. Even from the people with no critical notes here I see not much conrtibution. Maybe, like me, they donāt have (m)any questions for Michiel.
I have to say, this sounds rather disappointing to me, maybe because this is not what I understand as an AMA or what I expected.
I would have thought that the idea behind the AMA is to ask āexpertsā from Fairphone about background details or other, more general things that users are interested, in order to improve communication between the Fairphone team and the community; in order to have dialogue and to exchange information, thoughts, and ideas. So yes, I would have expected something different than talking about individual issues.
Answering questions to problems people have with their own devices rather sounds like the regular task for the support staff. Thus, given this statement, I am afraid this could just become two extra hours of regular duty for Michiel, in his evening time.
Hi anon9505190, Iām not sure where your idea of āexclusionā comes from. Someone has to start, they decided it would be Michiel. Seems reasonable to me, given how many people are concerned about the speed and reliability of the support team right now. For example, I would find it interesting to know if @fp1_wo_sw_updatesā calculation (in another thread, donāt remember where right now) of roughly 50,000 support tasks and 8000/week accomplished is roughly accurate. Or all those questions that keep coming up: how many phones are really DOA? How many are not DOA but have hardware problems? What are the most common hardware problems? How many phones are sent in for repair that could actually have been repaired by the users themselves? Lots of questions that I assume @anon48893843 might be able to shed some light on.
Maybe I missed something, but I donāt see @Douwe stating that other people will be āexcludedā from future AMAs. In fact, theyāre trying out a new concept and already saying that they might like to continue it if it goes well and is enjoyable for all. Perhaps āfunā is the wrong expectation, more like āhelpfulā, āinformativeā, āworthwhileā. And doing one person at a time (for 2 hours! Thatās a lot for the person answering questions!) makes sense to me, everything else would be overwhelming. Limiting it to the personās expertise: perfectly reasonable, what else should they talk about? Guesses about things they donāt really know? No, thank you. Finally, not collecting questions in the forum ahead of time means that even those who are maybe not comfortable posting in the forum could get a chance to ask a question.
I think this is a good idea, I think the parameters theyāve set are reasonable for the first time and I suspect the door isnāt closed on adjusting the form for the future if it turns out not to be conducive to what should be accomplished with an AMA.
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I am sorry how you think that I would exclude s.th. for the future on FPās behalf. Maybe you missed how I only answered that Douwe and/or FP never had the plan to do, is sorry giving room for expectations and couldnot recall about it. All in one post.
When I call this exclusion for the first AMA I am not sure why you think I can see into future AMAs. No, you are absolutely right, I am no future teller or even psychic. I am only realistic regarding Douwes present posts here and now.
Hey
Just to be clear: @emmyās response is very accurate and she has phrased it better then I could
We did not have the plan to go so fundamental into issues this time. But we sure hope that the AMA as a tool turns out to be useful and we can continue with it. This could for sure mean that any other team member and even our CEO can do an AMA in the future.
For now I am happy to hear your ideas on how to make this first trial a success and look forward to your feedback afterwards on what we can improve for the next time.
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I was just thinking about the AMA idea and recalled the Facebook chat @paulakreuzer and I did for T-Mobila Austria (Forum link). We were 2 āexpertsā and two women from the T-Mobile social media team, and it was hard to keep the overview and answer to all questions. And thatās with Facebookās comment system being slightly better organized than Discourseās (answers to a question appear directly below the question, no matter when they were asked).
So I have the feeling that Michiel will have a very hard time during the two hours. Iām suggesting a moderator, who deletes questions that donāt follow the rules (questions limit exceeded, has been asked before, etc -> rules would have to be agreed on first).
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Maybe you let again too much room for expecations 
There are so many!
True. A tip from Meta.discourse.com is that the person replying (in this case @anon48893843) should always quote the question in the post with the answer.
Yes, I think Iāll be sitting next to Michiel to help him with this.
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@Douwe: Could you please clarify the timezone? EST is often translated as Eastern Standard Time a timezone not so useful for a company from Europe (UTC-5). I think you mean āCentral European Timeā/Middle European Time ā¦ there is no official European Standard Time yet.
Please also add UTC for people from other countries. Thank you.
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I was completly mistaken. So today I learned EST is not European Standard Time.
What is meant is Amsterdam/Paris/Berlin/Vienna/Stromboli time.
Thnx for notifying me!
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No worries, everyone knew what you meant. But computers as example will not if you try to add it as an appointment or try to schedule it from another country.
17:00 to 19:00 CEST (UTC+02:00)
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Hey everyone, fun to see Iām a topic of discussion here, haha!
Apologies for not joining in on this discussion earlier. But as most of you will know, our support team is a bit too busy these days
Iām looking forward to tonight, I definitely donāt see it as something which our management team āmade me doā or as overtime work! This is simply an idea from my beloved colleague Douwe and Iām always up for trying something new, especially as it (hopefully) will shed some light on what our team does on a daily basis.
So, what the exact perspective of tonights session will be weāll just learn from the questions that come in. Hopefully I will be able to answer as many of your questions as possible, and if this becomes successful, more of my colleagues will be doing this as well.
See yāall then
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The AMA is open for your questions!
MIchiel is finishing his last tickets for today at his desk and will be with us shortly
Thank you all for thinking with us to make this happen and we are very curious to see how it goes 
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