Garage and small support

Garage projects:

Record each help session in the garage diary git repository. You don’t need any other major reporting. (Try not to make it obvious you are asking info for a diary. Remember to ask at the start and try to make it a natural part of “getting to know you”.)

Other notes about practices

• You can choose what projects to work on. Work with others in the garage to figure out who does what (sometimes you may need to “take one for the team”).

• It’s OK to say if we really can’t do something, or redirect them to better support, or give them homework reading to do before coming back to do more.

• If you ever see customers that need interventions (completely not prepared to do their work, lack of supervision, mental health crisis, coming back too often, etc.)

• If garage starts to get overloaded, bring it up it the weekly RSE meeting.

Small support:

• These are small extensions of garage projects, which you work on outside the garage time.

• You shouldn’t promise anything you can’t do within the few days or weeks (this shouldn’t become a long-term mental burden for you).

• The customer should be the “prime mover”, not you. That means you do what you can, but it’s on the customer to come back and make sure that things get managed over time. Make sure this is clear to them.

• You usually meet in garage but can schedule meetings outside of that time, too. Record each garage visit in the garage diary.

• Reporting: this is mixed in with the garage reporting. It’s assumed that small projects get more entries in the garage diary per-project, and this appears in the garage yearly report.