Hi everyone,

This Friday, May 4th, at 20:30 UTC the new editor engagement experiments team will be hosting our first IRC office hours. In case you missed it, Sue announced the creation of the team as a subset of the engineering and product department back in March.[1]

Though we're still in the process of hiring a designer and developers, we've already started an experiment or two,[2] which we'll be talking about. More importantly, we're interested in discussing some of our future ideas and how interested community members would like to see things set up so they can contribute to experiments. In prep for that discussion, I'd highly encourage everyone to read the FAQ we've put up and check out the talk page with some community suggestions already rolling in.[3]

I know "editor engagement" can sound like a somewhat meaningless piece of jargon, and something that may be of little interest to everyday Wikimedians. But as an example and a small plug for why you should attend, our first experiment is relevant to current changes in the software... watchlist emails were recently enabled for all projects, and in the few weeks prior to that, we've started testing what happens when you email lapsed Wikipedians inviting them to come back and check their watchlist.

As usual, documentation on office hours is on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours

1. http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/276223 2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement_Experiments 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editor_engagement_experiments

Thanks, and hopefully we'll see you Friday!