The Internet has changed the way we ask questions. Billions of people can now go to a web page, ask almost any imaginable question, and get some kind of response -- maybe right, maybe dramatically wrong, but some kind of response. It is this experience that is, in no small part, why the word "google" is now a verb. Alice, without realizing it, will quickly move from a "User" of Inkscape to a "Seeker" of information.

Our friend Alice has a problem. She has an Inkscape file with lots of cool images that some of her friends have made, and she wants to use them as part of a new illustration she's working on. But when she opens that file, and then tries to cut and paste into a new document, Inkscape crashes. Well, it crashes sometimes. And this unpredictability is becoming annoying -- so Alice goes to her favorite online anime discussion forum to ask her friends if they're seeing this problem.

One friend recommends that she go ask on the Inkscape developers mailing list. Another friend recommends that she file a bug. A third friend asks for more details: when does it happen? Does it happen randomly, or can she make it happen by doing a particular thing over and over? Then another person pops up and says that yes, he's had that problem too, but he works around it by opening his documents in a certain order. After some back-and-forth with this new friend, trying to figure out exactly what he means, Alice figures out the workaround: no more crashes! Alice thanks everyone for their help and gets back to her project.

Alice has become a seeker. By looking for answers, Alice has discovered a broad community of people who are willing to help her figure out how to do things a better way.