Tealeaf helps make our remote helpdesk even more awesome

Posted on by Floor

Categories: blog and news

The Remote Helpdesk was part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code concept right from the beginning. Coaches who are not assigned to a team (or just want to help even more) check in on the Helpdesk chat room to assist students with … any question they might have, should their local coaches not be immediately available.

Because both the students and remote coaches were located all around the globe, at least someone would be online at any time. And it did work reasonably well last year. But we think that’s not good enough. Our Remote Helpdesk wasn’t structured very well, and sometimes coaches weren’t actually available. On top of that we used IRC which isn’t accessible enough to newcomers.

Building a better Remote Helpdesk with Tealeaf Academy

So we decided to up the remote helpdesk to another level. We’ll be using Campfire this year, which is not only more accessible and nicer to look at, we can also paste screenshots more easily.

Apart from the tooling we are also very excited to announce that Tealeaf will be managing the Remote Helpdesk this year, and a number of Tealeaf students will be joining and give support on Campfire. The Tealeaf Academy offers Ruby on Rails Online Bootcamps and excels in teaching programming remotely.

We are thrilled to have some of the Tealeaf junior join our helpdesk because we ourselves learned the most when explaining things to someone who is only slightly less advanced. And they are dying to help create useful contributions to Open Source, so we think this idea fits the Rails Girls Summer of Code concepts very well.

You can find the list of our Remote Coaches here on our Teams application.

Please join us!

We are always looking for more people to join the helpdesk.

In case you are interested, please register via our Teams application and specify your role as “Helping as a remote coach (helpdesk)”. Then sign in to our Campfire chat room, and you’re good to go!