Upgrading our Discourse and Slack to Support Our Community Growth

April 4, 2022

4 min read

Summarize with AI:

We started the Airbyte Slack community in September 2020 with five internal team members. We were quickly joined by early open-source adopters and saw, as did most companies, everything was happening in Slack. It was organic, our community was helping one another, our team could easily troubleshoot problems. All of which helped inform our decision to form a dedicated team of user success engineers.

At the time, we had never seen any company building support teams specifically for an open-source community. Community at Airbyte isn’t just like the community at any other open-source project. If we are to commoditize data integration, it would be thanks to our community contributors.

What we’re seeing as our community grows is that a lot of context can get lost in Slack. The conversation can feel unfocused, with some users requesting troubleshooting help to others asking advice on best practices. Slack also doesn’t easily enable historical discovery of past questions and answers.

So we’re taking some steps to bring back the ✨magic ✨ in the Airbyte community, as dbt did in 2020.

Moving community voice from Slack to Discourse

Community voice includes feedback or questions on product, issues encountered, product ideas, anything that comes from the community for which Airbyte is not meeting an expectation or should continue to do well. Community voice is what drives us every day and helps focus our team on the right things to build and fix.

On Slack we receive more than 100 messages per day. And unfortunately, as Slack wasn’t designed for discussion consolidation or upvoting, it’s hard for us to get a clear view direction to move in. Enter Discourse.

On Discourse, you can upvote topics and sort by number of replies or views. Users can search to see if a topic was already discussed before posting one. This helps us better understand community voice and know which direction to move into.

For these reasons, we will move some specific Slack channels to Discourse:

#troubleshooting to Discourse’s Troubleshooting
#feedback-and-ideas to Discourse’s Product Feedback and Ideas
#connector-development to Discourse’s Connector Development
#contributing-to-airbyte to Discourse’s Contributing to Airbyte
#understanding-airbyte to Discourse’s Q&A

Making Slack more about community-oriented education

Regarding Slack, we actually have even more ambitions for it. We’ve seen that our Slack community has been exchanging tips and best practices, and we want to enable this more directly. We’ve created a few new thematic channels:

#advice-data-orchestration
#advice-data-ingestion
#advice-data-architecture
#advice-data-transformation
#advice-data-quality
#advice-data-warehouses
#advice-reverse-etl
#advice-data-privacy
#advice-data-visualization

These channels are a great place to ask for advice or help with use cases.

We tried to cover all topics that might be interesting to our data engineering and analyst audience. If you feel we’re missing any topic, please let us know in the new channel #community-strategy!

We’ve also added two new channels for Airbyte users:

#airbyte-for-beginners (previously named #getting-started)
#airbyte-for-power-users

Our user success team will continue to monitor Slack and provide help wherever possible.

Some additional channels while we scale

We have also added a few channels to let you get involved in Airbyte:

#community-strategy
#local-sf => don’t hesitate to add your own cities and to mingle with other community members. We’re actually thinking about organizing local meetups!
#events => we will post all events here. Don’t hesitate to share yours as well.
#airbyte-cloud => for all your questions about Airbyte Cloud

Why not invest in StackOverflow for troubleshooting?

We have been asked why we were not moving all our troubleshooting support efforts on StackOverflow. We’ve seen that we often need more information to help you than just a question. We love StackOverflow, but it doesn’t enable conversations like Slack or Discourse does.

What’s next?

We now have a dedicated team focused on our docs and will be investing a lot more in that. We have started moving our docs from GitBook to Docusaurus, which gives us a lot more customization to provide you with the best experience. We will be investing a lot in providing the best experience for Cloud users, open-source users, and contributors, and revamp our connector and API docs.

All this is just the first step to continuously make our community a great place to exchange, learn, and build new things related to data engineering.

And if you’re interested in having a say on the future of the Airbyte community, let me know in the #community-strategy channel in Slack! See you there :)

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