When people hear open source, many think of things like source code, repositories, reviews, etc. that are related to code or software. However, open source communities are much more than just code. Open source community is a place where people come together to collaborate on solving common problems that they care about—e.g. making it easier to build analytics tools for your business applications—and even form connections with other community members.
This is my second week at Cube Dev, and I'm excited to join the Cube.js community. I have been fortunate enough to work with a lot of great open source communities at the Linux Foundation and most recently at GitLab, but this opportunity to get involved during the early stage of building a community is definitely exciting.
I have already seen a lot of contributions—whether it's code, helping answer questions on Slack/Stack Overflow, opening issues, etc.—from the community and I look forward to playing my part in the continued growth of Cube.js. As I'm getting started, I wanted to initiate a couple of things to improve the communication in the community.
Streamlining our communications on Slack
Today we have more than 2,000 members on our Cube.js Slack instance. Slack is definitely one of the most popular tools today and is easy to use, but it can be challenging for everyone to do searches and it doesn't scale well for things like questions.
When you look at the Cube.js Slack today, most discussions are happening on the #general channel whether it's related to support, quick questions, or other announcements. In order to make it easier for you to navigate through different discussions, we recently added #announcement and #introductions channels:
- The
#announcementwill be used to post news of interest to the community like the recent funding announcement. - The
#introductionschannel is for new community members to introduce themselves. We hope this will foster closer connections in the community and make new members feel welcome.
Anyone who joins the Cube.js Slack will "auto join" these two new channels along with #general, and people who are currently on the #general channel will be bulk added to the new channels.
We encourage you to continue to post general Cube.js questions on the #general channel, but you will also see a lot of encouragement to post your questions on Stack Overflow if lot of community members may have similar question (e.g. for questions like "I don't understand this error message"). It's easier to search topics on Stack Overflow and we won't have to worry about losing old messages like we do in Slack with the 10k limit on messages.
Finally on Slack, you may have noticed the Cube logo next to the names of Cube Dev team members. We believe this will make it easier for you to identify the Cube Dev team members in Slack.
Holding regular community calls
Although asynchronous communications/workflow is the norm in open source, synchronous conversations/meetings (even if it's virtual) can provide opportunities for more interactions among community members. Starting in November, we'll kick off a monthly community call so that community members can discuss various topics of interest in the community. Potential topics include Cube Dev team's plans for the quarter, reviewing backlogs, interesting use cases, community metrics, etc. We also encourage you to suggest potential topics for future calls on Slack.
You will hear about upcoming meeting announcements on Slack, Twitter, newsletter, etc. We will also post meeting logistics information including the Zoom link, links to meeting notes/recordings, etc. in the Cube.js GitHub repo (e.g. in the CONTRIBUTING.md file) so that you can also go to the same place to find the meeting information.
These are two quick things for now, but please stay tuned for more to come in the Cube.js community in future blog posts. Please don't hesitate to find me on Slack (Ray Paik) or email me at ray@cube.dev if you have any feedback or if you'd like to schedule a virtual coffee chat. I look forward to meeting many of you in the near future!