Free Ideas! Announcing Our New Open Office Hours

IMPORTANT! We have made some changes to the schedule and format of our office hours (starting in June 2015), they are now held every Friday from 2-3 pm ET. More details here.

We're a small team juggling a lot of projects. There's not always much time to answer questions (particularly those not directly related to the products we build and support) or to give thoughtful feedback on projects that people bring to us.

But we want to be accessible, approachable and create an opportunity for INN members (and members of the journalism and tech community at large) to ask us about any tech-related issues they may have or to get feedback on their projects.

So we're going to start setting aside some dedicated time every month as a team to do just that.

Starting next month we will hold open office hours on the first Thursday of the month from 3-5 p.m. CT. For now we're going to do this once a month, but we might do them more frequently if there's sufficient demand.

Here's how it's going to work:

Anyone can sign up for a 30-minute block to meet with our entire team and get feedback on tech-related issues you might be facing (new project ideas, critique of works in progress, general tech/strategy/design questions, etc.). You can sign up for a longer block of time if you clear it with us in advance.

Here's the signup sheet.

INN members will get priority but, if space is available, we'll open the signups to any organization or individual on the Monday before each month's hangout. If we're already booked, you can put yourself on the waitlist and we'll let you know if a spot becomes available.

Since we're a remote team, these will be Zoom.us video calls (the persistent link for this call is right here). (This used to be a Google Hangout; we changed it in July 2016)

The default for these hangouts will be public because we think sharing ideas in the open helps everyone learn and improve but if you want to keep the conversation just between us, indicate that on the signup sheet and we'll set up a separate, private hangout.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us on how to make these office hours work best for you and your organization, email us anytime: nerds@inn.org.