We’ve been hosting farmOS monthly calls pretty much since the beginning (~4 or 5 years I think) - and they have been really great ways to engage with people who are interested in farmOS. Sometimes there are over a dozen people on the call (and sometimes there are 2). 
On today’s call, we talked a little bit about the future of the monthly calls, and whether or not we could improve them, or if there are alternatives.
One idea that came up was the idea of having standard “office hours” in the farmOS chat instead (with the option of spinning up a video call if/when we felt it was necessary). We don’t record the video calls, so a lot of the great conversations we have aren’t saved anywhere. And they require a fast internet connection, which may be a blocker for some people (even I have trouble sometimes). The farmOS chat room, on the other hand, is logged (http://irc.farmos.org/), and works even with limited bandwidth.
What do others think? Would chat office hours (with occasional video calls) be a option for the community? Would more people be likely to join (and/or just lurk)? Or are the video calls really valuable for the face-to-face?
I have not been able to ever join a call so it is hard for me to have real valid input on where the future should be but I really like this discourse forum for conversations and follow up and engagement. I have used this with other things and I like the ability to catch up on conversations and then contribute.
It’s not something that I think needs to change or happen but maybe a category for those open notes and conversations would be a good change.
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Thanks for the input @applecreekacres - I really like this Discourse forum too! Wish we had set it up a long time ago.
IRC office hours would be better for me, I dont have cell service at my house.
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Realized I never documented this idea, but we were talking in chat about the idea of also doing something like “volunteer days” where we could perhaps invite people to help out with things like bug fixing and code improvements for devs, as well as documentation/tutorial writing, translating, website improvements and bug-reporting for non-devs. I’m thinking along the lines of It’s My Park Day, which are popular in city parks as a way of building community engagement and making people feel included, while also making real improvements to the infrastructure. For us it could also be a great opportunity for community members to have access to the devs to ask questions, make suggestions, etc. Perhaps we could do a live stream and post the recording when we were done too.
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