Community Office Hours

Meet and ask Umbraco HQ

Written by Ilham Boulghallat

Umbraco has experimented with different discussion formats: Codegarden retreat, Roundtable discussions, Codegarden Open circles, etc. All are a great way to connect with the Umbraco community and help bring Umbraco HQ closer to understanding what the community thinks, expects, and wishes for. These formats have however some limitations as they are usually connected to a specific event and most are invite-only for a select group of people. In order to serve a similar purpose but on a larger and more inclusive scale, we’re launching Community Office Hours.

What is Community Office Hours?

Regular Q&A-style sessions that provide the community with the opportunity to ask Umbraco HQ questions on specific topics that go from product updates to introducing new hires and various initiatives. They can also be open for general questions and topic suggestions from the community.

The concept is used by other companies such as Hashicorp and provides a great way to connect the organization behind the open-source projects and tools with the community.

Launching Umbraco Community Office Hours

To kick off this new initiative, we will dedicate the first session to introducing the concept and the goals we would like to achieve. We will also be answering the questions submitted by the community in a public form that was recently created by a community member, Tim Geyssens. The questions listed in the form will be organized by theme and presented by a host/moderator to respondents from Umbraco HQ. A copy of the questions submitted from February 1st to February 5th is available here. We’re not collecting more questions for this initial session, but feel free to add your questions to the relevant upcoming Community Office Hours session.

Where can I find information about the upcoming sessions?

A public calendar is available on a dedicated section on community.umbraco.com which lists the four upcoming sessions. The plan is to assess this initiative by the fourth session and improve it going forward. Each session is planned to last 1 hour.

Launch session (24 February 2021 at 4 pm CET) - Introduction of the concept of Community Office Hours and answering questions from the community.

Participants: Kim Sneum Madsen, Filip Bruun Bech-Larsen, and Ilham Boulghallat
Host/Moderator: Rachel Breeze

Session 2 (10 March 2021 at 4pm CET) - Meet the Umbraco Developer Advocates

Participants: Arnold Visser, Emma Burstow, Warren Buckley
Host/Moderator: Henk Boelman

Session 3 (7 April 2021 at 4pm CET) - Updates on Unicore Project with the Unicore Community Team

Participants: Unicore Community Team
Host/Moderator: TBA

Session 4 (12 May 2021 at 4pm CET) - Topic to be selected (Open for the community to suggest a topic)

How can I submit a question?

A link is available under each upcoming session on community.umbraco.com

If a community member prefers to reach out directly and not submit their question publicly, they are always welcome to write to community@umbraco.com

How are the sessions run?

The sessions are run by a moderator who can be an HQ employee or a volunteer community member.

The moderator prepares the questions submitted by the community in the form available on community.umbraco.com. Ideally, the moderator curates and organizes the questions to avoid redundancy and to make sure they are aligned with our Code of Conduct. They also make sure the questions are grouped by theme or sub-theme. Each session is planned to last 1 hour and in case a high interest is expressed by the community and a significant number of questions is submitted, the moderator can choose to set up more than one session to make sure to cover all inquiries.

If there is enough time, the moderator can ask the audience to ask live during the session.

What if I miss the live session?

All sessions will be summarized in a recap post and shared on the Umbraco blog.

The sessions will also be recorded and made available on the Community Youtube channel.

We look forward to starting this new initiative and hope this will bring Umbraco HQ and the community even closer.

View details and upcoming sessions