Upgrading our Discourse and Slack to Support Our Community Growth

The Airbyte team started its Slack community in September 2020 with five internal members. It quickly grew to include early open-source adopters, and the company decided to form a dedicated user success engineering team. However, as the community expanded, it became clear that Slack was not ideal for managing discussions or enabling historical discovery of past questions and answers. To address this issue, Airbyte is moving some specific Slack channels to Discourse, which allows users to upvote topics, sort by number of replies or views, and search for previously discussed topics before posting new ones. This change will help the company better understand community voice and know which direction to move into. Additionally, Airbyte has created several thematic channels on Slack for exchanging tips and best practices related to data engineering and analytics. The team is also investing in improving its documentation and providing a better experience for both open-source users and contributors.