@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 “Central European Time”/Middle European Time … there is no official European Standard Time yet. 
Please also add UTC for people from other countries. Thank you.
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!
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)
Hey everyone, fun to see I’m 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 
I’m looking forward to tonight, I definitely don’t see it as something which our management team ‘made me do’ or as overtime work! This is simply an idea from my beloved colleague Douwe and I’m 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 we’ll 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 y’all then 
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 
Once again I’m under impressed. I don’t blame you guys personally, but for me Fairphone the company focuses way too much on not giving out information that could make the FP look bad.
Maybe this is needed to be able to produce a FP3 some time in the future, but I think a bit more openness about current issues will not hurt. I’m here to help, I’m not trying to trick you or to make you look bad.
I don’t get high on being super critical. I just don’t want to buy a second FP1 by purchasing a FP2. Currently, I just don’t trust you enough anymore. 
Wow… That surely wasn’t the first reaction I expected
Michael really told all he knows and admitted what he didn’t know… It seems you think we are some strategic masterminds weighing every message. I assure you, we are not. We are limited by time and space and knowledge just as everyone else.
I currently do not know how he could have done better…
Could you be more specific?
I think he wanted specific failure rates of the FP2 modules and/or the FP1 parts.
I thought it was quite nice, actually.
I guess it depends a lot on what expectations you go in with. I figured that FP wasn’t going to be sending over an itemized list of statistics on their repair cases, but it was interesting for me to find out that a lot of phones are sent in due to water damage and that apparently the back cover with overlapping lip over the screen is still not enough from preventing people from “installing the spider app”. I was also glad to hear that FP makes case-by-case assessments on whether phones actually need to be sent in to them or if they can just send an updated module to the consumer, which means excessive transport is avoided. Finally, there were a couple of comments indicating that an FP3 is being developed and they are working on an updated camera module. Both of those things I had heard between the lines and as rumors, but not said quite so explicitly before from official FP employees.
Beyond that…it just seemed kind of nice to have a “date” at a particular time and all sit together and chat a bit. I can’t really imagine most larger companies doing this sort of open Q&A session and while I didn’t feel like I had a huge number of questions for @anon48893843 in particular, I just appreciate the fact that he (and @Douwe!) took the time to talk to us for a while. For all the things FP does well or doesn’t do well, I like that to me they are more a collection of individuals, many of whose names I even know, than an anonymous company. It feels like a much more personal relationship and given that they are still a COMPANY (even a social enterprise is a company!), I feel like they’re doing a pretty good job of sharing information.
Hi Douwe,
I am not so pessimistic like @fp1_wo_sw_updates . And I believe that Michiel really couldnot answer some specific answers e.g. to my question that I repeated as a follow up to @emmy 's first question. He simply doesnot know the answer about the first reason for in-warranty returns for the moment . I hope he now informs himself about it. The only reason he knew was the one he called cool-off for refunding. However we all know that many in-warranty returns of FP2 have had specific reasons that could be named in 1-2 words. I simply guess it is also the display e.g. by the terrific stripes all over the display. So I could have only asked 3rd time if the display was the main reason for in-warranty returns.
Also I guess how @Michiel was a bit nervous anyway. He has my understanding.
The answer that you cite is about a different question that is not the same question that you had. And you had a good question right as an opener. Thanks for it. Unfortunately it was left unanswered at AMA. It doesnot really help if we both are guessing more or less. Don’t get me wrong but I am still missing an authorized answer about the main reason of in-warranty returns. Only display/screen part also is also not very precise. Because so many displays are returned for those annoying stripes I would have only expected to know if the stripes have been the main reason or if another display issue was the main reason. Sorry if I misinterpreted your first question . But I didnot expect that you have been searching in others answers instead of getting a direct answer to your good question. That was why I asked again and again.
You did all you could do, as I said I don’t blame you. Please enjoy your after AMA beer and pizza. I don’t want to be the wise-ass party pooper ruining a good idea. I think the AMA is still a good idea, somehow.
But after writing 1k posts here … I’m not sure if I want to write another lengthy piece about why talking openly about problems with your community as a company that wants to be different is a good thing. So I just quote my unanswered self, it’s easier this way, so I don’t have to bring up examples or lessons learned from the FP1 area.
“Are you able to share these “support stats” with the community? It would help us helping, because there is no public bug tracker right now.” Aug 11, 6:52 PM
If you want people to write support articles, let them know what is really needed. The posts in the forum are misleading.
Share information with them if hardware problems are normal fluctuations on the manufacturer side or if there might be some design issues or firmware-related issues. It’s not that difficult.
Also I like the little support checklist from the blog, what to check before contacting support, but it could be greatly improved by adding two or three more items. This is something forum members could link to if people have an issue.
But most issues are not “official” yet and the topics one could link are often confusing to read. Writing guides for the Top 10 issues would be easy.
If you have data, share it. Don’t make “we don’t have time to implement xxx” an excuse. If you share more info, people will use it to help the project, I’m sure.
Why don’t you test it with something small? Like data on the screens or the camera module so people can see what it means compared to the numbers of phones shipped in total?
Enjoy your beer!
Nothing is official yet, but as time permits and their is no reason to rush of to China, Fairphone CTO Olivier Hebert will be the next AMA candidate.
I scheduled it for 8 September and hope to get into a ‘Fairphone AMA second Thursday of the Month’ rhythm.
I also wonder why no detailed stats are shared with the community.
Most importantly I’d like to know how many Fairphones really fail (also in comparison to other phone companies, as discussed here.
While I’m interested in stats, I don’t need to compare FP with other companies. I can accept a much higher failure rate, as long as the issues, possible solutions and possible workarounds are discussed openly.
The idea of the Fairphone was to shine light into the pretty unknown process of cell phone production. I still don’t understand this. Who will be responsible for what? FP did the design (I think …) … but the hardware inside the modules used by the ODM are mostly 3rd party components. Are fixes still possible? What about hardware with high failure rates? How are these things handled? If the camera has really high failure rates, why not switch to a different brand? It would be easy (for FP) to update the software to support two cameras, I guess. All these things could get discussed here.
I just think it’s interesting and support data would help helping people, thus also helping the support and the users.
Else, if this is not wanted by Fairphone, I have to assume that they just want to sell “fair” Phones they design themselves, but without talking much about it. That is fine, but somehow not what I was looking for. Maybe I just misunderstood the project from the start?
Is the AMA idea dead?
In my opinion this was a great format and I would have loved to see more FP staff members openly communicating with the FP community.
Personally I could imagine that community members may be particularly interested to get the chance for raising some questions to someone from the (FP2) software development team or product design team.
@Douwe Are there plans to continue with the AMAs?
Hey @freibadschwimmer, thanks for reminding me. The format is not dead, but it was hard to find people in the team with time to do one. Somehow the people working on the most interesting projects at Fairphone are also the most busy people.
Maybe now the holiday season is over, it will get easier.
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