We've decided to make a few changes to our open office hours based on some feedback and requests we've gotten from our members and community.

It's been really exciting for us to help out with the projects that people bring to our office hours. But we've also heard from a number of folks at our member organizations, people who are often the only designer or developer on their team, that they don't have anyone to help review their code, give feedback on their design work, or have project retrospectives to look at recent projects and talk about what went well, what they might improve next time, etc.

So we've decided to hold our office hours more frequently and also to structure them in a way that will allow us to be better at giving this sort of feedback. This way, we'll be able to act as a resource and sounding board for these lone developers and designers while still preserving an opportunity for people to come and ask us more general questions.

Here's what we're going to try (starting in June):

• Instead of doing a two hour block once a month, we'll now do an hour every week (on Friday from 2-3 ET).
• Time slots will now be 20 minutes long (instead of 30), but we'd like to encourage people to sign up for more time (the full hour if necessary) if you think you'll need it and we'll try to accommodate. Generally we want to be able to dig a bit deeper and get into more complicated questions about your design or coding challenges and we know that sometimes that will take a bit more time.
• Sign up as early as you can (preferably by Monday the week you want to attend) so we can get some more background on your project or questions, review your work and potentially ask some questions in advance to help us get the most out of our time together.
• During unused slots we'll have code or design reviews for our own projects that you're more than welcome to participate in and help us make our work better. Hopefully seeing how we handle this sort of feedback internally will give you some ideas you can take back to your own organizations.

The office hours will still be held via Google Hangout (link), and they will still be completely open to the public by default – because we believe our community is strongest when we have a chance to learn from one another – but ask us if your project involves sensitive information that you may not want to share publicly.

The signup link also remains the same.

As always, if you have thoughts on ways we can better support your work, we'd love to hear them.

We hope you're able to join us in the coming weeks!