Community

Office Hours

Every other Wednesday, the Meltano team meets with our users and community members. The main objectives of this meeting are:

  1. To gain outside perspective on product direction. Feedback can corroborate our direction and intuitions, but it can also show us perspectives which we may not yet have considered.
  2. To share internal deliberations with the community. The goal here is to spread awareness while gaining benefit of insight from external perspectives.
  3. To hear directly and “face to face” from community members on topics they care about. We invite every Meltano community member to openly share any pressing topics or questions they might have.

Sourcing Contributors

  • Within the week or two leading up to the office hours, look out for at least one or two community members and corresponding topics which can benefit from synchronous communication.
  • Prep a list of contributor names so we can call them out during the session as time allows. (Use a dedicated slide with their names or aliases if warranted.)
  • Timebox rotating topics and set expectations ahead of time in the slides: e.g. 15 minutes for dedicated topic, 45 minutes for questions, debugging, AMA, etc.

Best Practices

  • When discussions are in progress, drop the screenshare in order to give participants more face time.
  • Be aware that the owner’s view layout (gallery or otherwise) also changes the view for others.
  • Share any relevant links in the zoom chat.

Office Hours Planning

Product leadership will perform the following maintenance:

  1. Move those topics on the Office Hours board in GitHub into the “Discussed” column, effectively resetting the “Up Next” list for the upcoming week.
  2. For any upcoming, in-progress, or recently released features that need discussion or refinement:
    1. Move into Up Next on the Office Hours board in GitHub.
    2. Tag an engineer or another team member on the issue, requesting grooming of the description - or any other needed prep, per the engineer’s discretion.

If fewer than 3 topics are selected as candidates for discussion in the upcoming week, and/or if one or more topics require community member attendance, then Engineering or Product leadership will raise these concerns as new threads in the #office-hours-planning channel.

Office Hours Content Escalations

Our goal is to have 3 medium-sized topics for each office hours, roughly 30-45 minutes of internally-curated content in order to make the most of our attendees’ valuable time.

In cases where there is an expected shortage of Office Hours content, reach out to community members who have raised topics or opened MRs with us recently. Especially relevant are contributors who have proposed net-new functionality, including new plugins, new capabilities, and other feature improvements which are relevant for team discussion. Community members with long-running or outstanding MRs also make good invitees, in hopes that a face-to-face conversation could unblock or otherwise assist the contributor’s MR to progress forward.

We will not cancel Office Hours sessions for lack of content, but may opt to conclude the session early, any time after 10 minutes elapsed. Sessions will always be held open for 10 minutes minimum, to allow time for community members to join and offer proposed topics or questions.

Community Support Tools

Slack

Slack is our primary way of providing support for the community and most channels redirect folks to Slack to get help. See the support handbook for information on SLAs and what we monitor.

HubSpot Chat

HubSpot is currently embeded on meltano.com. Users can message us here to receive support and are encouraged to join Slack instead of using HubSpot. At some point this will be used for lead gen instead.

HubSpot Tickets

Tickets are currently routed to @Douwe Maan.

User Interviews

Occasionally we’ll do user interviews to gather product/docs feedback. These interviews are added to HubSpot.

If users share an observation about Meltano’s performance and benefits, write down what they say (verbatim) and ask them for permission to use the quote, whether fully attributed or “blinded.” If you hear use case stories, ask if we might be able to interview them and share their story.

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