It’s been three weeks since I started talking publicly about what we are attempting to do with Ringer. I had spent about 6 weeks pulling together various lists and spreadsheets of good projects, repos and contributors that I had built over the years and finally started sending emails on 9th August.

The response from the community has been incredible.

I won’t gush over it, but I can only be grateful for the feedback I have received; both the positive that has pushed me through late nights and long weekends, and the negative which showed me where weaknesses in the platform were and community concerns I had overlooked.

Today we are opening the customer side to complete the loop, which marks the real beginning - now we need to make sure we deliver on what we have said we will. I’d like to tell you a little more on our plans to allow that to happen.

Not just support

Ringer is designed to do more than just allow those in need to find a quick fix for a bug. The breadth of expertise that I’ve found in our growing community is amazing. Experts who can provide detailed training to teams; experts who can provide architectural help for when designing a large application; experts who can full implementation and integration of their packages and so much more.

Today Experts are able to flag what they can provide help with - we’ve started with some set tags that marry up to the tags on the initial enquiry form that customers fill in, and we’re going to grow that soon. We want Experts to be able to provide the services that they are great at, whatever they are, on Ringer.

Extending your expertise

We’ve heard loud and clear that many people develop packages for use with another piece of software, and have deep expertise but not contributory history on that package. We’re looking at how to roll this out but we are really keen to allow experts to show their knowledge in a wide range of repositories. We need to do this sensitively, so expect an email if you’ve asked about this.

Language is an easier one, but getting the expertise

Bringing customers to you

We’ve spent a lot of the past 3 weeks working on improvements to the platform, fixing bugs and improving UI and UX. What time we’ve had left has been spent doing two things - communicating with our community and having conversations with customers.

Our focus now is to bring customers to Ringer, to make sure that experts on the platform can see the value that we can provide.