Office hours

I'm experimenting with public office hours to talk with anyone about open access to research.

The idea is to be online periodically (at publicly announced dates and times) with an "open door" to a teleconferencing room (at a publicly announced URL). I'll invite any/all who are free at the time and interested in the topic to drop in to chat.

I'll start with Zoom.

• To make it easy to drop in, I will not 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 either I'll drop the experiment or move to a different platform where it might be safer.
• When I pick a new date and time, I'll post them to Twitter.
• I'll probably use a different Zoom session URL for each meeting. But I'm still thinking about that. I may not always have time to post them to this page; I want to support frictionless spontaneity for me too, not just for the drop-ins.
  • If I use the same Zoom session URL every time, I'll post it on this page.
  • If I use a different URL each time, I'll post it to Twitter along with the date and time.

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).

If you have ideas on how to make this experiment work, or if you'd like to set up a meeting, please let me know.

— Peter Suber