Office hours

I'm experimenting with public office hours to talk with anyone about open access to research — my focus for 20+ years.

I'll pick some dates and times, open an online videoconferencing room, and invite any/all who are free at the time and interested in the topic to drop in to chat.

• I'll make the dates, times, and URLs public on Twitter.
• I'll use the hashtag #officehours in each Twitter invitation. Hence a boolean search on my Twitter handle and that hashtag will pull up all my sessions to date.
• If you don't have a Zoom account, you'll still be able to join the meeting by clicking on the URL in the tweet.

I'll start the experiment on Zoom.

• To make it easy to drop in, I won't require passwords or advanced sign-ups.
• To reduce the risk of Zoombombing, I'll start with certain settings (such as the waiting room) and tweak them in light of my experience. If I can't sufficiently reduce the risk of Zoombombing, then I'll modify the experiment (say, requiring sign-ups and/or passwords), drop it, or move to a different platform where it might be safer.
• I'll probably use a different Zoom session URL for each meeting. But I'm still thinking about that.

I'd like to make this convenient for people in different time zones. But there's no getting around the fact that I'm in the Boston area. Depending on the season of the year, that's EDT (UTC-4) or EST (UTC-5).

To set up a meeting or suggest improvements to the experiment, please just drop me a line.

— Peter Suber