Proposal: Community Support Groups, Office Hours, and Optional Paid Support for Planetary Computer Users

[Ethan-Chen421]

Hi Planetary Computer team and community,

First of all, thank you for providing Microsoft Planetary Computer. Many researchers, developers, and organizations rely on this platform for remote sensing, agriculture, environmental monitoring, and geospatial applications.

Recently, several users have encountered recurring issues such as STAC API timeouts, delayed data ingestion, missing assets, 404 asset URLs, authentication/token problems, and intermittent service instability. Many of these issues are reported on GitHub, but in practice it is sometimes difficult for users to know whether a problem is caused by their own code, a temporary service issue, a dataset ingestion delay, or a known platform-side problem.

I would like to propose a more structured community support mechanism.

Proposal

1. Regional or language-based community groups

The user community could organize regional or language-based groups, for example:

• Chinese-speaking users
• European users
• North American users
• South Asian users
• Latin American users
• Africa-focused users

These groups could help users discuss common problems in their own language and time zone. However, GitHub Discussions and Issues should remain the official public record.

2. Community coordinators

Each group could have one or two volunteer coordinators who help:

• collect recurring issues;
• reduce duplicate GitHub issues;
• prepare minimal reproducible examples;
• summarize affected collections, time ranges, and API endpoints;
• escalate well-documented issues to GitHub.

This could reduce the burden on maintainers and make reports easier to triage.

3. Regular office hours or community calls

It would be very helpful if the Planetary Computer team could consider a regular monthly or biweekly community office hour. Even a short session would help users understand:

• known service-side issues;
• dataset ingestion delays;
• recommended API usage patterns;
• best practices for avoiding STAC timeouts;
• roadmap or maintenance expectations.

4. Public known-issues or service-status page

A lightweight known-issues page would be extremely useful. For example:

• Sentinel-1 ingestion status;
• Sentinel-2 ingestion status;
• STAC API availability;
• asset access issues;
• authentication/token issues;
• current incidents or delayed datasets.

This would help users distinguish platform-side issues from local code problems.

5. Optional paid support or sponsorship

Some academic groups, companies, and application developers depend on Planetary Computer for production or research workflows. Some of us would be willing to pay for:

• priority technical support;
• SLA-like response options;
• maintenance sponsorship;
• enterprise support;
• consulting or support hours from the maintainers.

Would Microsoft or the Planetary Computer team be open to discussing an official paid support, sponsorship, or enterprise support model?

Why this matters

Planetary Computer is very valuable for the remote sensing and geospatial community. A more structured support mechanism could benefit both users and maintainers:

• users get clearer communication and better reliability;
• maintainers receive better-organized issue reports;
• duplicate issues are reduced;
• serious platform problems can be identified faster;
• the community can contribute more effectively.

I would be happy to help organize a Chinese-speaking user group and summarize recurring issues from users in agriculture, remote sensing, and geospatial application development.

Thank you for considering this proposal.