[Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours "The future of e-mail usage in Wikimedia projects" 2012-07-18 16:30 UTC

[Steven Walling]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Excuse me. Just about a month ago, we had a discussion about spreading out
> the times during which office hours would be hosted. Instead of increased
> diversity in times, it seems ALL office hours are now being scheduled
> during a very narrow window of time from roughly 1530 UTC to 1800 UTC.
> Now, I don't have a problem with *some* office hours being scheduled then.
> But I can't remember the last time an office hour was scheduled outside of
> that narrow window.  So...if you wish to have diverse opinions, you need to
> engage people who aren't available during normal business hours throughout
> the Western world.  At this point, office hours have essentially become the
> same group of people meeting at about the same time to discuss whatever the
> topic of the day is. Now, maybe that's the objective here, and I'm
> misunderstanding.
>

Just to follow up on this topic...

Saturday we held the office hours for the editor engagement experiments
team. As Risker pointed out, we did get it a crowd that was slightly
different, mostly people who were from North American timezones likely to
be working or in school during other office hours. It felt like a success
to me.

I think in the future it will be fruitful to hold some office hours outside
normal business hours West Coast time, though obviously not everyone will
want to work on the weekends all the time. ;-)

Regards,

Steven