Timi Wahalahti 9:13 am on February 23, 2019
Tags: community-events ( 55 ), community-team ( 173 ), discussion ( 9 ), Office Hours ( 12 )

Discussion: continuity of Community Office Hours

Office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. are usually quite quiet, people ask their questions when it’s convenient for them and deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. forgot to open or close those (regardless of the bot we have to remind us). There is almost always deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. to answer questions or if there isn’t, the question will be caught up later when some deputy sees it.

So, I’d like to question if community hours are really needed and propose their retirement. In exchange there are few things we could do to encourage people to ask questions freely.

During the last community team meetings, few good ideas were conducted from the discussion:

replace the office hours sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. and welcome box text with something more general about #community-events channel and encouraging to ask questions at all times
having a random empathy bot that reminds #community-team that we should post something encouraging to #community-events if the channel has been quiet for some time

Some concerns were also raised:

some people are waiting for the office hours before asking their questions
we don’t want to loose a human touch so having a bot in #community-events opening/closing office hours, sending random reminder messages or auto-replying is not an option
we need to be very clear that people can ask their questions any time, but know that they may not get an immediate answer

Please share your thoughts about retiring office hours or ideas on how to evolve those! Comments will close 10.4., please leave your comment before that.

#discussion, #office-hours

Hugh Lashbrooke 9:55 am on February 26, 2019

I agree that Office HoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. tend to be very quiet and are often more of a burden (albeit a fairly small one) on deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. than something that is actually helpful for the community. If we did stop doing them, then we would definitely need to replace them with something else and I really like your proposed ideas here – a “random empathy bot” to send reminders in the #community-team channel for deputies to post in #community-events about us being available for questions would be super useful.

The main point of Office Hours has been to ensure that community members have a place where they know they can ask questions, so if we replace that with occasional posting in #community-events to ensure folks that we are around then I think that would work nicely and wouldn’t tie us into specific times of the week. Tying that with a general welcoming note in this P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. and welcome box and I think we should still hit the goals of Office Hours quite well.
Andrea Middleton 12:21 am on February 27, 2019

When we introduced office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time., we were trying to cut down on the number of times deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. interrupted their other-work to answer questions synchronously in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. We also wanted to make sure that people knew *where and when* they could ask questions and have someone answer synchronously.

I agree that office hours are nearly always silent these days, though I personally love the level of commitment to our volunteers that we show when we say “we’re setting aside one hour per day to answer whatever questions are backlogged in the channel, or asked during the actual hour.”

It’s possible that office hours are less active these days because we’re doing a better job with mentoring new organizers and improving our documentation?

I don’t love the bot idea — seems a little cold, especially for us?

I guess I just wonder… given that Office Hours (OH) don’t require a physical presence, how much time are we saving by deprecating them? If there are no questions during the hour, presumably the person “staffing” OHs is working on their own projects or on application vetting or something?

To me, Office Hours seem like a low-effort commitment that won’t necessarily give us any time back if we stop offering them, but maybe other people don’t share my perspective there. 🙂
Cami Kaos 10:01 pm on February 27, 2019

Yes, they are often empty. But I still think it’s worth setting the time aside to offer them. The commitment to be there for others is the part that feels most valuable to me. Whether it’s to answer a question someone has then, answer a question someone asked earlier, to take time to answer pings, or even just to remind folks that office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. are an option I think setting aside the time is valuable.
Birgit Pauli-Haack 11:58 pm on March 4, 2019

Office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. are important, as we have what 1000 meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organizers and 300 WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizers, that might need our assistance. It’s much easier to communicate that we have four slots every week, we promise we will be there if any of them have questions.

This promise is what I like, and in 2018, I showed up for office hours every Wednesday night, not as regular in 2019 due to some freak scheduling mishaps. 8 times our of 10 no one showed up with real questions, but those 2 times people have actually been waiting for the office hours to be announced to post their question, or people who had questions throughout the day would come back to get their answers. We got things resolved or into the queue.

I didn’t mind, as my work never ends, I’ll be on the computer anyway, finishing up my day. Sometimes I used it to find out where WordCamp will be over the weekend and share that in the channel… sometimes I catch up on Community make posts, like this one. Office hours didn’t take anything away from me and I was ready for whoever in the world had questions. Not being called upon is a blessing. Means people are good.

As we are all about the people connection, seems Bots are a terrible idea for our team.
mirkohumbert 9:59 am on March 14, 2019

As a new meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organizer, I can give you feedback on the office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time.. I joined the slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel upon recommendation from another meetup group organizer who told me it was the best way to get a reply from the deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook..

The announcement of office hours is kind of reassuring in the sense that it tells people “you can be sure to have answers at this time”. For that, I think they are very useful.

This said, I understand how time-consuming it can be for deputies, so I’d say that if you keep office hours, twice a week seems pretty good already. If you were to remove completely office hours, I’d suggest that when a deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. has some time, she/he can just announce on the community-events channel that someone is there to answer to them in the next hour.
Timi Wahalahti 8:28 am on March 26, 2019

As a result of this conversation, there’s definitely need and place for community office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. so let’s continue keeping those. Thank you all who commented and shared their experiences!

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Discussion: continuity of Community Office Hours

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