Pulp has a Community Manager!

Hello,

You might have seen my name popping up on the Pulp blog or on the mailing list. I want to take some time to introduce myself.

Since April, I have been helping out with both the Pulp and Foreman communities. Previous to this, Brian Bouterse and Ina Panova had led all Pulp community related activities on top of their engineering work. I’ve been working with Brian and Ina to take over all community-related aspects of Pulp so that they can focus full time on their engineering duties.

In the Foreman community, I have some set tasks like running community demos, organizing virtual events, putting together the community newsletter, as well as unblocking community members and making sure that people get answers to their questions on a daily basis. For both the Foreman and Pulp communities, I am particularly interested in lowering the barrier of entry for users.

Over the past number of years, Pulp community efforts focused on enabling community contributions. Recently, this has manifested in a robust plugin API and plugin template so that community members have a clear path to making contributions and extending Pulp to meet their needs. At PulpCon 2020, there were several sessions that focused on the community and how we can grow as a community and increase community interaction. For the foreseeable future, the Pulp community strategy will focus on the user experience and making Pulp easier to use and to interact with, with the overall aim to grow the number of Pulp users.

Since I started with the Pulp community, I’ve been working on building out the web content on this site so that new and existing Pulp users can find the information they need. I’m committed to making the Pulp blog an up-to-date source of information related to Pulp. On this blog, I will endeavour to increase transparency and provide clear information related to Pulp releases and roadmaps, as well as requests for community feedback for different ideas and proof of concepts that the Pulp team are working on. I’ve also started monthly summaries of all releases and discussions going on in the Pulp community. I’ll be paying attention to ways of enhancing the channels of communication so that people can find us and get the information they need. If you have any ideas about how I could extend this, let me know!

During the Pulp team’s first ever virtual PulpCon, I was delighted to meet community members who dropped by to say hello and tell the Pulp team about their experiences using Pulp. While a 2020 of travel restrictions has meant that we have not had the opportunity to meet in person, PulpCon 2020 showed us how there are advantages to hosting open meetings in a virtual space where community members can become part of the conversation without leaving their homes.

Brian and Ina, as well as the wider Pulp team, have been very generous with their time and knowledge as I get up to speed with Pulp as a project as well as the needs and concerns of the Pulp community. I would like to thank the entire Pulp team for their patience and generosity over the last few months.

The team is always hoping to hear from you, either on the pulp-list@redhat.com or on the #pulp channel on Freenode IRC.

Feel free to reach out to and say hi at mcorr on Freenode IRC. I am based in Cork, Ireland, which is in the GMT timezone.