Wikimedia Research/Office hours

The office hours are a public forum to make 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 Research and Analytics 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.

Scope
We encourage you to attend the office hour if you have research related questions. These can be questions abour 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).

How to attend
We meet every fourth Wednesday every month at 18.00-19.00 (UTC) starting in January 2020. You can join and participate in our IRC channel on freenode:. If you are new to IRC, we suggest you use the following approach to connect:


 * Go to Freenode Webchat
 * Choose a nickname for yourself (this can be your real name or not)
 * Type #wikimedia-research in the Channel box.
 * Click Start and you are now in the correct chatroom.

If you miss the office hour, you can read the logs.

Announcements will be made over the following places, so subscribe to them if you want to receive the latest updates:


 * wiki-research-l mailing list


 * analytics mailing list


 * wikidata mailing list


 * discuss-space at wmf-labs

Interaction
If you would like to ask a question, simply type in the chat. Everyone will do their best to answer as quickly as possible.

If you would like answer others' questions, that is great. We encourage you to take advantage of "/me" - statements, For example, if User2 types User2 is working on a response to the question asked by User1
 *  /me is working on a response to the question asked by User1
 * it will appear as
 * This is not only important to provide feedback to the one asking that the question is not ignored, but also for others to potentially wait for your response in order to avoid duplicating answers.

Upcoming events
The next office hour will take place on

* Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 18.00-19.00 (UTC)

Link to Etherpad with notes and possibility to add items to the agenda.

Past events

 * Wednesday, March 25, 2020, 1700-18.00 (UTC)
 * Wednesday, February 26, 2020, 1700-18.00 (UTC)
 * Wednesday, January 22, 2020, 1700-18.00 (UTC)