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Now I'm wondering if I should make it available for the lower tiers as well.
People always expect free Github replies and responses to PRs and issues. But it is almost taboo to expect free consultation and office hours. Great way to make some money if you have developed a popular library!
Services with notifications like GitHub should allow you to delay notifications until your indicated availability. Ignoring them isn't good enough and some people have them sent to their personal email.
Isn't this kind of a paradox? Most open source maintainers work in their free time on those projects, and have an additional fulltime job to cover the bills. Assuming that everybody has the luxury to have additional office hours available is a bit far from reality in my opinion. I mean, if you can offer office hours for an open source project you probably are already so popular that you are able to work on it fulltim…
Per the article, he's not saying you should work on the project during office hours. Instead, to get feedback from users, he's allocating some time where users can have a talk with him about the project. He's calling that 'Office Hours'.
I think that it's a really valuable suggestion.
That is not what the article is suggesting.
From the article -
>> anyone can book a 25 minute conversation with me on a Friday to talk about the project. I’m interested in talking to people who are using Datasette, or who are considering using it, or who just want to have a chat.
>>A challenge of open source is that it’s easy to be starved of feedback. People might file bug reports if something breaks, but other than that it can feel like publishing software into a void.
>> Hearing directly from people who are using your stuff is incredibly motivational. It’s also an amazing source of ideas and feedback on where the project should go next.
I think that's really a fantastic suggestion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the 'should' is targeted at developers who want their projects to grow (which is not all open-source developers).
To riff on this I think this weird expectation of projects to "grow" is a side effect of the increasing corporate influence on F/OSS. So many conference talks' second slide is a "numbers" slide wit how many github stars, active contributors and other vanity metrics. It strikes me that the point is not just to convey that the project has an ecosystem behind it (with the implication there being that you can get free fe…
Or it's because in the end people like being popular and always have. Social standing, social cred and all that. I mean, look at all the people who obsess about their instagram or twitter follower counts. Being a FOSS developer doesn't remove all the usual human drives and desires that most people have.
OSS devs rely on donations, but office hours would be a great paid service. The demand for OSS is so high, depending on the centrality of your library, you could easily charge $10-$100 an hour for this. People always expect free Github replies and responses to PRs and issues. But it is almost taboo to expect free consultation and office hours. Great way to make some money if you have developed a popular library!
I think a lot of the comments are concluding from the title that open source maintainers should be working on the projects during office hours. That is not what the article is suggesting. From the article - >> anyone can book a 25 minute conversation with me on a Friday to talk about the project. I’m interested in talking to people who are using Datasette, or who are considering using it, or who just want to have a c…
I've had massive success with this in ML. My twitter DMs have become almost-daily office hour sessions with people trying to solve hard ML problems. The last fellow was so happy he venmo'd me $250 after I merely asked for "pay whatever you thought that was worth." Apparently putting "DMs open" in your twitter bio is an excellent way to meet new people. Also, tweet (often!) about what you're working on. Post lots of q…
It's kind of neat observing the same economics that drive Instagram influencers also drive sharing logical thinking. I wonder if both sides of the human brain behave the same way? (organic v. ogic). Actually it's far more likely that social effects are the cause, and social effects benefit both organic runaway trains as well as logical runaway trains.