Introducing "office hours" community calls

[jaimergp]

One of the unconference segments in the NumFOCUS summit 2023 in Amsterdam was dedicated to packaging and we spoke a lot about how PyData maintainers experience friction when they are testing workflows or contributing packages to the conda ecosystem. One of the action items hinted at the necessity for better documentation and educational materials.

Inspired by the Numpy Newcomers meetings, I wonder if the conda (and conda-forge) communities would benefit from having such a space where novice (or not so novice!) users can pass by and ask their questions. Our current community calls have a tint of core decision making, expert discussions and reporting that might make it unaccessible or daunting to those that just want to solve a couple doubts.

My intention would be to run this session one hour before the core calls in case the attendees want to stay. With good note taking, we might be able to accumulate good documentation drafts for proper content in conda.org, FAQs and whatnot.

Tagging @travishathaway and @tnabtaf for their interest and alignment, but anyone is welcome to drop their thoughts here!

[jezdez]

I've participated in the NumFOCUS summit unconference session and wholeheartedly agree that it would be beneficial to provide office hours, if possible, in a way combining the two sister projects conda and conda-forge.

If we do it, let's also add it to the https://conda.org/community/calendar calendar as well.

[travishathaway]

I'm onboard with this 😄.

I'd be happy to write a quick blog post announcing these, "office hours" for conda.org too.

[dashagurova]

During the Conda community meeting (meeting notes), I brought up the idea of office hours, and most people seemed to like it. The main concerns were about time zones and staffing, especially since many users are in Asia. We can discuss further here.

Personally, I think we should avoid overthinking and just give it a try. We can start with office hours in the EU timezone (since we already have a volunteer - @travishathaway ) and maybe in the US, and see how it goes?

Another point that came up was Discord as a community chat, which could make organizing calls easier. I'm not saying we should switch to Discord just because of that, but the topic of our chat platform (Element) has come up before. I started a general discussion about switching chat platforms last week, and I'd love your input on that too. Here’s the link. Here’s the link.