Introducing StarTree Community Slack

Today StarTree is rolling out a brand new Slack workspace: the StarTree Community Slack. I’d like to explain what we’re up to and how I hope it helps you and the Apache Pinot™ community grow in more robust ways.

StarTree is dedicated to a healthy and growing Apache Pinot™ community. We were founded by the co-creators of Pinot, and Pinot is an essential part of our DNA as a company. It’s a privilege that part of my work involves building teams that nurture technology communities, and I love doing it, but it goes deeper than that here. Our success depends on the success of Pinot, and so a healthy Pinot is always our singular objective.

But that doesn’t mean we can just do any old thing we want. Pinot is a project of the Apache Software Foundation, and the Apache way prevents any single vendor from exercising undue influence over a project. This can take many forms, like a vendor opening up channels in the public, Apache-branded Pinot Slack workspace to support its own non-Apache products. As StarTree builds more and more features into its cloud service and begins to release community-licensed products of its own, we need a place to support them, talk about them, and generally nurture a community around them. That can’t be the existing Pinot Slack workspace, because it’s dedicated to Pinot only, and for us to drive discussion of StarTree things there would be the essence of bad citizenship. It needs to be something broader.

That broader Slack workspace is exactly what we’re creating today. It’s a place open to all kinds of questions: about Apache Pinot, StarTree Data Manager, StarTree’s cloud service, other products we release in the future, or just regular discussion of real-time analytics as a category.

Let me give you an idea of what you can expect from StarTree Community Slack going forward:

• A safe and inclusive place where people interact in respectful and welcoming ways.
• The best minds in real-time analytics, ready to help. That’s you and others like you! Additionally, StarTree will be staffing this Slack with its own developer advocates, engineers, and product managers to answer questions, help solve problems, and discuss ideas.
• Support for StarTree products. If you’ve got questions about the community-supported edition of a StarTree product, this is where you can get help from our experts and talk to others who are doing the same.
• Support for Apache Pinot. You can always come to StarTree Community Slack and ask questions about Pinot. Pinot is our bread and butter, we love it, we know it well, and we want to make it easy and fun for you to use it.
• Absolutely no sales pitches, ever. Our policies forbid sales activity in this workspace. Just like the Apache Pinot Slack, this is a community space, not a place to sell you things.

Now that it’s much more clear, the only thing left for you to do is sign up! We are waiting there to welcome you. I look forward to building the real-time analytics community with you!