Links:
Discord Server URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Discord/DiscordServer

Contact: Setesh Strong <setesh.strong@gmail.com>

The FreeBSD Community Discord server has grown to over 5.3K members, with over 3K members active in the last month. To help support our community’s health and pursue growth in project contribution and engagement, the BSDlabs group developed the Helper program, more than two years ago now. After several phases of growth, we have reached the point where the team has thrived enough that it has become necessary to divide it into three distinct functional teams.

Our community health and culture helpers (@moderators) are led by Alexander Vereeken. Our newcomer onboarding and training helpers (@mentors) are led by Alexander Ziaee. Our event organizer and outreach helpers (@organizers) are led by Ahmad Abdulla.

Since the creation of the new teams, all of our helpers have been hard at work, driving growth within the areas of their remit within the program. We are proud to share some of the outcomes of their efforts with you, as well as several of the areas of focus and objectives we will tackle in the upcoming quarter.

Antranig Vartanian led the development of our recurring series of Ask the Greybeards AMAs (Ask Me Anything) with the support of other veteran sysadmins and developers. This recurring event provides an opportunity for users and those still gaining mastery of our platform to meet and learn from the depth of experience our community offers. Special thanks to Michael Dexter and many others for their engagement and support of this event. Your expertise and skills help nurture the future of our ecosystem.

Significant progress into onboarding new contributors has occurred through the efforts of the newcomer helper team under Alexander Ziaee’s leadership. His work has brought newly increased activity to our docs tree.

At the request of Warner Losh, we have created a workspace for #google-summer-of-code on the server. This space provides a location for those engaged with GSoC to ask questions and receive feedback and assistance. In further pursuit of our desire to bridge between silos, we are in the process of establishing a matterbridge bot. This will serve to connect with the #freebsd-gsoc IRC channel, as well as other potential links in the future with FreeBSD’s IRC and Matrix communities.

We are proud to welcome developers working on FreeBSD’s wifi stack to our server. We have created the #wifi-hacking workspace to facilitate their efforts. Special thanks to Adrian Chadd for bringing this opportunity to us, and leading the way in the thriving activity in this workspace.

We are currently in the process of developing our new Co-op Study Club, driven by the leadership of Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen. This will provide members of our community with the opportunity to build their skills in side-by-side study, under the guidance of our newcomer helper team. As a project driven study group, it will develop our members’ passions into strengths, while building comfort and familiarity with contributing to the project via porting, src development, and documentation testing and patching. Experienced mentorship will be on hand to provide learning resources for those who join this study group, answer questions that cannot be answered by peer support, and aiding in overcoming blockers. Our objective is to provide a roadmap and environment for achieving excellence as both developers and FreeBSD contributors.

Thanks to the efforts of community helper Jessica Hawkwell, with the support of events team leader Ahmad Abdulla, we have seen the addition of a #foss-ecosystem channel. This development marks the beginning of the process of bridging between the various silos, both within the FreeBSD community, and in the larger FOSS ecosystem. If you want us to add a link to your segment of the community and it is not already contained in our directory in this channel, please reach out to us.

In addition to the existing tools afforded by Discord for our server, we are currently in the process of upgrading and expanding our infrastructure. This effort focuses on ensuring the availability of Discord bot infrastructure and tooling, as well as restoring etherpad and dpaste functionality for collaboration. We seek to improve support for all of the dedicated developers within the workspaces of our community.

If you are a member of the FreeBSD ecosystem and have not yet connected to our Discord presence, we invite you to do so via the invite link available on the wiki at the top of this report. If you have experience or passion for any of the areas of our current helper teams, or a passion for Discord bot infrastructure development, we would love to have you on our teams. We invite you to contact us via the above contact email, or by sending a DM on Discord (@setesh.strong).