In free software projects, the best "support" is often available directly from your own community. However, that support happens on informal channels - like IRC, or mailing lists, or web forums, and it can be difficult to capture those discussions and turn it into a more structured knowledgebase.

Launchpad's Answer Tracker provides a framework for just that. It's also useful as a way of tracking system administration requests - for example, to create new accounts in the project if you have shared systems for developers.

Questions show up in lists for each project in the system. For example, here are the latest questions for Ubuntu:

• https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu

And here's a snapshot of those at the time of writing:

attachment:ubuntuquestions.png

Note that some of the questions are general "Ubuntu" questions, and others are focused on the use of a specific package.

Answer contacts

There's no joy in asking questions into a vacuum. Launchpad lets members of your community become "answer contacts", who will be notified when a new question is asked. Here are some of the answer contacts for Ubuntu:

• attachment:ubuntuanswercontacts.png

In the case of Ubuntu, you can become an answer contact for any package, or for the distribution as a whole. This lets people focus on the areas they know best, or be generalists who try to help whatever the particular issue is that a user is having.

Local language support

Free software is a global phenomenon. By and large, developers of free software speak English, so much of the correspondence about bugs or features happens in that language. When it comes to end-user support, however, local languages are key. Launchpad allows you to specify the languages that you speak, and then it will try to connect people asking questions in a given language with people offering to answer those questions in the same language.

By default, you will also only see the questions in languages that you have said you can speak.

• attachment:questionlanguages.png

The Answer Tracker is one of the pieces of Launchpad that we intend to make entirely accessible in your local language, because it's designed to bring together communities in every corner of the globe to harness their shared knowledge and help new users become comfortable with free software.