Hi all, We, the Research team at Wikimedia Foundation, have received some requests over the past months for making ourselves more available to answer some of the research questions that you as Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates' staff, and researchers face in your projects and initiatives. Starting January 2020, we will experiment with monthly office hours organized jointly by our team and the Analytics team where you can join us and direct your questions to us. We will revisit this experiment in June 2020 to assess whether to continue it or not. The scope We encourage you to attend the office hour if you have research related questions. These can be questions about our teams, our projects, or more importantly questions about your projects or ideas that we can support you with during the office hours. You can also ask us questions about how to use a specific dataset available to you, to answer a question you have, or some other question. Note that the purpose of the office hours is to answer your questions during the dedicated time of the office hour. Questions that may require many hours of back-and-forth between our team and you are not suited for this forum. For these bigger questions, however, we are happy to brainstorm with you in the office hour and point you to some good directions to explore further on your own (and maybe come back in the next office hour and ask more questions). Time and Location We meet on the 4th Wednesday of every month 17.00-18.00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-research IRC channel on freenode [1]. The first meeting will be on January 22. Up-to-date information on mediawiki [2] Archiving If you miss the office hour, you can read the logs of it at [3]. The future announcements about these office hours will only go to the following lists so please make sure you're subscribed to them if you like to receive a ping: * wiki-research-l mailing list [4] * analytics mailing list [5] * wikidata mailing list [6] * the Research category in Space [7] on behalf of Research and Analytics at WMF, Martin [1] irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-research [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours [3] https://wm-bot.wmflabs.org/logs/%23wikimedia-research/ [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l [5] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics [6] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata [7] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/tags/research -- Martin Gerlach Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation