PGConf NYC Keynote - Community Initiatives - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

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