Striking the Right Balance with Community Slack

Effective April 30th, 2024, Pantheon's Community Slack instance will operate as a single general channel. All topic-specific channels will be archived and complex conversations in need of resolution will be linked to GitHub issues where they can be more effectively tracked and resolved. While these channels have served as valuable spaces for focused discussions, we believe that consolidating conversations into a single channel will promote cross-pollination of ideas and facilitate more inclusive discussions. The valuable insights shared in these channels will remain accessible for reference by Pantheon staff and cross-referenced to other systems. 

We too are not immune from over-procuring technology. At Pantheon, we have an existential bet on there being a happy middle ground between gigantic all-in-one DXPs that take forever to get off the ground and the extreme alternative of assembling dozens of niche SaaSs to make one website.

Yet still, we procured a lot of niche SaaSs for ourselves to cover overlapping ground in the nearly nine years since I joined Pantheon.

Just in my four-person sub-department (Developer Relations) I oversee the SSG that powers docs.pantheon.io, the LMS that powers learning.pantheon.io, portions of our root pantheon.io, and multiple community management tools including our eight-year-old Slack workspace open to any and all community members.

Each of these tools exists in part to answer overlapping questions from long-time time users of Pantheon and those just getting started:

• "How do I get my site live?"
• "When do I need to convert to a paid plan?"
• "Where do I make code changes?"

As Pantheon has grown, our Community Slack workspace has served as a bridge, where people can more directly ask their own versions of these questions, and oftentimes get a solid answer.

Come with a Question: Stay for The Community

While the need to answer a question seems to be the consistent force that drives people to join our Community Slack instance, many active members stay for a sense of collegiality. I've used the same task management software for a decade. But I don't feel that I have any colleagues at that company or among fellow customers. When I joined Pantheon as an employee because of the sense of teamwork and community I felt when I first used it. Like Drupal's phrase of "come for the code, stay for the community," the essential value that I want to keep and cultivate with our Community Slack instance builds relationships between web professionals at different companies who first just needed something narrower.

Specialty Tools

While being present in the same Slack channel cultivates some collegiality, it is not the most effective means of resolving the pain points frequently discussed. Complex topics like local development workflows and continuous integrations repeatedly come up in Slack. While we don't expect to generate perfect or all-encompassing answers to these topics, Pantheon staff will be more effective at providing better answers if we direct more focus to issue queues than to open-ended chats.

Additionally, we are finding that scheduled Zoom meetings, like our regular public office hours, and more focused topic-based "Show and Tell" sessions build peer to peer relationships across our community just as well, if not better than narrow Slack channels.  

We’re Here for You 

We are committed to continuously improving a community of web professionals . These changes to our Slack workspace reflect our dedication to fostering a vibrant and supportive space where every voice is heard and we most effectively produce better answers to the shared challenges of web site operations. We value your feedback and invite you to share any thoughts or suggestions. by emailing community@pantheon.io or by attending our regularly scheduled office hours (Wednesdays at 2pm Eastern).  For more details on this change, please review this FAQ.