PGConf NYC Keynote - Community Initiatives

Hello everyone!

Over the last year or so, I’ve had the pleasure of having a number of
conversations and interactions with Andreas Scherbaum, Alicja Kucharczyk,
Robert Treat, Pat Wright and others about how to grow the overall Postgres
community at a more grass roots level. Many of my thoughts (or
frustrations) were largely due to my previous experience with the SQL
Server community and some of the community building initiatives they have
undertaken for many years.

Fortunately my community has grown within the Postgres world (largely due
to my work with Timescale) and this has helped me see the vibrant,
world-wide Postgres community. Still, I continue to find that many users
that are trying to enter the Postgres community from different
communities struggle with similar issues.

Some of my initial thoughts on how to tackle this problem were presented in
a PGConf NYC keynote (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ot_uoDgeUE&list=PLiT-kUSX8USVDO_StcVoErex-l-pVvrvv&index=3)
To my surprise, many people approached me afterwards that had similar
experiences... some of which were attending PGConf after starting their
first Postgres job weeks before!

Andreas continued the conversation in the PostgreSQL Slack #pg-promotion
channel and we discussed a number of ideas, from live webinars that would
compare/contrast various databases with Postgres, to more community focused
initiatives like a monthly “blog fest” (called PSQL Phriday) on a common
topic, as well as getting a coordinated effort behind a #pghelp hashtag on
Twitter.

In another week, I plan to release a personal blog post discussing these
two initiatives and announcing the beginning of PSQL Phriday with a list of
hosts for the first few months. Any further ideas or discussion would be
easiest in the PostgreSQL Slack room mentioned above, but I’m happy to
answer them here as well (I’m slower to respond to email to be transparent.
:-)

Overview of the initiatives below.

*PSQL Phriday*

A monthly “blog fest” that can be hosted by anyone in the community. The
goal is to encourage more community blog involvement by providing a common
theme each month and getting traffic to blogs by having a central “roundup”
of all blog submissions by the host each month. We’ll try it for 6 months
and then re-evaluate.

By the first Friday of each month, the host for that month will post the
topic to Twitter and through their Planet Postgres blog feed. On the second
Friday of each month, anyone that wants to take part can share a post (also
with the #PSQLPhriday hashtag on Twitter). The job of the host is to
aggregate all of the links and give a 1-2 sentence synopsis of the post and
share it within a few days.

The next month, we repeat with a new host and a topic of their choice.
Topics can be technical or not, it just has to be focused somehow around
Postgres and the larger community. (sample ideas: best HA story, how you
use indexes effectively, last time you had to recover from a mistake,
coolest Postgres SQL trick, conference talk that had the most impact in
your career, etc.).

Again, the goal is participation (help new community members feel/be
integrated) and to allow other people to host that aren’t always the “big
names”. Hopefully we end up with no repeat hosts for 2-3 years!)

*#pghelp Twitter Hashtag*

This one might feel a bit old or out of sync with so many of the other
communication avenues people have access to. And yet, Twitter remains a
place where tons of people are seeking help for Postgres related issues.
Robert Treat has tried to handle this himself for years by sometimes taking
replies with #pghelp, but it’s never really taken off because others aren’t
doing the same.

The main tenet of a hashtag like this is that nobody is required to answer.
And, while we could try to “guard” the hashtag from other uses (advertisers
love to latch on to successful hashtags), the overall goal is to at least
get a first response or conversation on a problem. The hope, however, is
that the first interaction is always “aggressively welcoming”. It’s a place
to help and direct, not have the loudest voice. If the Slack channel is a
better place to get help, kindly direct them. If the person that can best
answer this question only uses the email lists, direct them there. “RTM”
isn’t the stock answer, but it’s fine to direct to relevant documentation.
;-)

I hope some of you will take part, and again, happy to answer questions and
have more discussion in the #pg-promotion channel in Slack.

Kind Regards,

Ryan Booz
Developer Advocate at Timescale