It might also be interesting to setup something where you just post tagged questions and then people can look at the tags that they know about and answer them.
A "other methods of communication" field would be a nice thing to have as well. IRC handles/servers would be something I'd like to add, and I'm sure other people have their own unique forms of communication they'd like to make themselves available by.
I think interacting with folks over skype/chat might build a deeper relationship--gasp! even friendship--than a message board.
There is spontaneity to chat that the highly transactional Q&A format doesn't allow.
I love this idea... we're actually been thinking about taking some of the experts at Mahalo (i.e. our guitar teacher), and doing streaming lessons/chat/office hours.
Oh poop. I'm the ezl from the github repo where that source lives. Was hoping we'd have more time to fix it before being embarassed.
HNOH was intended to be a quick weekend project (famous last words). We didn't quite make it in the weekend, so we just let it hang out in his half complete state.
rguzman, smalter, and I have been meaning to put some love into it, but we've been slammed working on what we think will be our real startup, http://www.leasely.com, so we've not really carved out the time.
Its broken and buggy, the calendar features don't work right, and there are issues with creating/canceling recurring office hours. We'd LOVE for this to be used in real life, but its not in a state we can really say we're super proud of yet. We want anyone who wants to be involved to get involved, so if you have hours to donate, please get in touch.
The heavy lifting was done by HN users: rguzman, deuterium, C Allen from NYC (github.com/bitemyapp/, http://bitemyapp.com), and a few others.
So we f-ed up, there are still bugs, and its been on the backburner since we're trying to work on leasely but now we've been embarassed into fixing the bugs so we will.
[edit: linked to C Allen's github and personal page]
I don't care so much about the bugs: the big problem with these HN+ sites seems to be that they get an initial boost and then sort of fade away because people forget about them and new people don't find them.
For something like this it's not a maybe. I hear about services like this all the time and never hear about them again. If you want this thing to become a part of the hn community someone's going to have to put work into seeing that it hits the front page from time to time.
Otherwise it's often just a flash in the pan. Good luck!
Just wondering, why'd you opt to only allow those with hn accounts to use the site? I've been lurking here for a long time and had no intent of creating an account (mostly because I blame antics like mine for the decline of reddit so I vowed never to create a hn account, but I digress) but was forced to now to be a part of hnofficehours.
Even though there are already sites like StackExchange, I think this project has (potentially) a character of its own. Sadly, it doesn't seem to want anything to do with me. I get the following error when trying to signup:
This is a great idea. It's much more personal than the stack sites and feels more like a mentorship set-up (a la big brother, big sister). I also think that the 1-to-1 connection is encouraging for askers: I oftentimes don't post to stackoverflow because I don't know if the question will ever be answered. At least there is a better chance of some form of life responding from the other end.
I think a lot of techies feel that way and IMHO they're wrong. Ironically it's because they always respond to this feeling of inadequacy with "time to learn new skills" is why they're wrong.
It's an interesting idea technically, though socially people, in the main, find it difficult to pick up the phone and talk to someone they know nothing about (beyond a few tags and a name).
Even showing a Gravatar and making it mandatory to provide a homepage URL or Twitter link would allow users to do a quick bit of "research" on someone they want to call in order to feel more comfortable and to build up a little virtual rapport ahead of time.
Seconded. I'd feel a lot more comfortable chatting people up with questions if I had a peek into the projects they've done before.
And, knowing I'd like to have people call me up with their projects, it's to everyone's advantage to bring the barrier to entry down as much as reasonably possible.
Great! Love it! Found one small bug: when you view a user's profile, your own profile name at the top becomes a link to the viewed user's profile rather than your own.
78 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadI guess that would basically be an HN Opzi. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/opzi-a-quora-for-the-enterp...)
1) I shouldn't be able to add "web design" skill twice.
2) When entering skills, I get the ajax list but I can't click on it to select it (Chrome 9dev).
3) Timezones should be sorted by time, not location.
There is spontaneity to chat that the highly transactional Q&A format doesn't allow.
I love this idea... we're actually been thinking about taking some of the experts at Mahalo (i.e. our guitar teacher), and doing streaming lessons/chat/office hours.
This throws an error. Also, DEBUG = False
And the source code: https://github.com/ezl/hnofficehours
HNOH was intended to be a quick weekend project (famous last words). We didn't quite make it in the weekend, so we just let it hang out in his half complete state.
rguzman, smalter, and I have been meaning to put some love into it, but we've been slammed working on what we think will be our real startup, http://www.leasely.com, so we've not really carved out the time.
Its broken and buggy, the calendar features don't work right, and there are issues with creating/canceling recurring office hours. We'd LOVE for this to be used in real life, but its not in a state we can really say we're super proud of yet. We want anyone who wants to be involved to get involved, so if you have hours to donate, please get in touch.
The heavy lifting was done by HN users: rguzman, deuterium, C Allen from NYC (github.com/bitemyapp/, http://bitemyapp.com), and a few others.
So we f-ed up, there are still bugs, and its been on the backburner since we're trying to work on leasely but now we've been embarassed into fixing the bugs so we will.
[edit: linked to C Allen's github and personal page]
Otherwise it's often just a flash in the pan. Good luck!
"The url does not appear to be in your hn profile. Please paste http://hnofficehours.com/profile/PedroCandeias/ into your hn profile. Note the trailing slash."
Even though I did include the url in my profile.
## Edit It finally acknowledged my existence, but I had to add linebreaks before and after the url in my profile.
Well done. I hope to see it take off.
Great idea!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Even showing a Gravatar and making it mandatory to provide a homepage URL or Twitter link would allow users to do a quick bit of "research" on someone they want to call in order to feel more comfortable and to build up a little virtual rapport ahead of time.
And, knowing I'd like to have people call me up with their projects, it's to everyone's advantage to bring the barrier to entry down as much as reasonably possible.