Hi everyone,

Today at 18:00 UTC will be IRC Office Hours with the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner. As usual it will take place in #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net. You can find links to time conversions and a guide to accessing IRC at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours

Reflecting on the past few chat sessions, we've noticed that the most productive (in terms of most questions answered, most participants etc.) have been the ones with a little bit of prep work on the topic. The recent fundraising session, Sue's on Pending Changes, and interviews with new Wikimedia staff have all been extremely helpful.

That's why we'd like to try something a little different for Sue's Office Hours today.

We're going to devote the first 30 minutes for a structured topic discussion. During that 30 minutes attendees can write their questions on the Meta page mentioned above, and simultaneously !vote on/discuss the proposed questions. The 3-6 top questions will be answered during the second half of the hour. This way we actually answer the questions that interest the attendees, rather than miss really valuable questions and discussion.

We hope you'll try this experiment with us. We're trying to find some balance between a free-flowing discussion and some structure that allows deeper conversation about topics important to Wikimedia.

Thanks,