PGConf.EU 2025 Community Summit – PGConf EU Edition
Community Summit – PGConf EU Edition
Website on PGConf.EU conference system
About
In this 3-hour summit (with 2 90-minute sessions with 4 breakouts each) we will:
- Perform an “unconference” like exercise to determine which aspects of community we should cover. The hosts will come armed with some teaser topics, but the group will be asked to add to the list and then vote.
- Break into smaller groups to tackle areas the group believes are most important
- Report out to the larger group by each small group
- Each group adds their results to the PostgreSQL Wiki
- Determine a way for us to track our progress moving forward
Participants should be committed to build, support, or maintain a community in some way, and be ready to leave the summit with concrete action items to move the Postgres community forward. While the hosts from this summit are from the US & Europe, we hope that folks from less established Postgres communities will join us.
Schedule
As a starting point we plan to:
- Hold 2 90-minute sessions with a 30-minute break in-between
- Each 90-minute session will have: 10-min intro, break into groups for 50-min discussion, come back together as a full group for report-outs from each group
- Each session with have cover 3 topics in 3 break-out groups
- Take an ~ 30-min break in-between, and then come back and repeat with new topics.
However, our schedule will depend on how many people attend, and preferences of the team. We might:
- stay as one group, and go through more topics serially based on interest
- repeat the same topics in the 2nd session with different participants and facilitator
- something else that is suggested during the session
- Application Developer/ Engineer Outreach
- Building community through social activities
- Communication channels: Slack, Discord, Telegram, Mailing lists, Reddit, Stack Overflow - what can be done to improve coordination and minimize repetition
Cross-project collaboration in the FOSS world - how Postgres works with projects
- Exhibition outreach at Non-Postgres Events
- Event planning
- Improving processes or infrastructure/resources
- Learning/ training for non-developers
- Outreach to Academia
- Postgres as a public good - Government & non-profit use cases that benefit society, like open data platforms
- Recognizing, encouraging and retaining contributors of all types
- Recruiting new hackers, devs, & community contributors
- Supporting/ Increasing/ Driving diversity in the PG community
TOPIC #1: Recognizing / Retaining contributors of all types =
Moderator: Andreas Time Keeper: Note Taker: Teresa Report Out: n/a Other participants:
NOTES:
Current ways of recognition - FORMAL: core team, major contributors, contributors - by the Contributor Team, at least once per year - COMMUNITY project: anything that happens anywhere - Contributor Coins - Contributors on the release notes in every release
How can we transform the community list into actual data?
- Is there a way for people to submit? - Create for form for people to submit contributions
Data is still limited
How do we capture the work that is not already visible?
What about tracking the contributions on the wiki pages?
Raise awareness to the community effort
No real transparency of the formal process
Sub-levels of each type of contribution
If you capture time spent and what you worked on, we can have a nice visualization of what the community it working on.
Philosophical difference: some want a very legalistic process, others don't - you can game the system
What is the level of impact?
Visibility vs Impact
Continuous act of contribution
What about a process of nomination?
LinkedIn channel steady stream: Podcasts, videos, etc...
Create a social working group...
Language barrier - what about recognition for other areas (Japan, Middle East)
Digital version of coins
What about GDPR issues?
ACTION ITEMS (Task, Owner, Target)
- Rob Treat: create a process to pull names from release notes; process Mark uses to identify who gets the coins, data easily available - Cornelia: Announce new contributors at conferences - (Kevin) Jay offered to help with gathering data...intake form - modify to set aside time with Ads to talk about all the various websites - (Kevin) Jay - talk to Stacey about new ways to recognize contributors via PGUS channels
TOPIC #2: EVENT PLANNING =
Moderator: Andreas Time Keeper: Note Taker: Teresa Other participants:(Kevin) Jay, Charis, Bruce, Dave, Rob, Stacey, Devrim, Cornelia, ???, ???
NOTES:
Meetups - how do you start running a Postgres meetups? - awareness - what support do I get from Postgres to run meetups
- 2019 finalized a plan for Meetups - sponsored the Meetup.com fee - stickers, USB drives, hats - how to find a location - find a sponsor for the food
- Checklist (add link)
What would motivate people to come to a meetup? - need to know well in advance so that people know about it - speakers - time for discussion with others - networking - education - people who are looking for a job
- stickers for who is hiring / who is looking
- how do we get people who are offering jobs to the meetup - give sponsors an opportunity to speak at the beginning of a meeting - for virtual meetups - offer companies an opportunity to say if they are sponsoring
- Postgres job fair with talks
- If you start giving beer to people, they will come more - that is what people do after work
- why not invite a Python person to speak at a Postgres meetup
- effort to have 4 meetups per year consistently
- what if we don't do talks: hikes, go get pizza - no risk events - Postgres curious open space - low commitment - requires people going outside the PG community - cross promote with other groups
- how do you make people that are new to the community feel comfortable - allow +1 - seasoned person welcome a new person - ask at the beginning if anyone is new - make sure to have an easy way for people to join the group - have a game to play - ask who is new and take note - welcome, talk to them during the breaks - lean into your local market, local culture - followup on people that sign up but do not show up
IN-PERSON VS VIRTUAL Meetups - why do we not record talks at conferences - Lowlands - has streaming and in-person - SD Python: originally weekly in-person meetup, evolved to monthly in-person with weekly on Discord
NON-PG EVENT OUTREACH
PGUS has the expo committee - takes the PG events to non-PG events Mark Wong & Robert Treat staff the najority of these Need to post opportunities in advance Focusing on events that were successful, and new opportunities - drop events that have not been successful
Identify & document the events well ahead of time
Create a page / wiki with the info on these events
Help set-up the room if you let us use it for a day
Use event CFP to be include the CFP for your event
Need to find the right set of volunteers - can't represent the company they work for
Don't have any money - we are a non-profit discount
Document common FAQs
Promote the PGUSAdvocacy Mailing List?
Postgres Hacking Discord
ACTION ITEMS (Task, Owner, Target)
Robert Treat: dig up guidelines etc developed in 2019 and share with the group Teresa: Dig up Elly's meetup talk Video: https://youtu.be/hL7g9lPtyig Slides: https://cdn.posetteconf.com/images/posette/slides/POSETTE2025_presentation_Elly.pdf (Kevin) Jay: Diversity group task to reach out to meetups that are not meeting Stacey: central web page for non-PG events being supported by PGUS Robert: document common FAQs at non-PG events Robert: post a few things on the PGUSAdvocacy mailing list
TOPIC #3: XXXXX =
Moderator: Time Keeper: Note Taker: Report Out: Other participants:
REPORT OUT:
ACTION ITEMS (Task, Owner, Target)
