We’ve moved to Slack for Nonprofits

Last night we made the move over to Slack. When the Leadership Team was formed we picked Discord as our chat medium due to the free nature of the application as well as not having to worry about losing any messages if we were to have used Slack’s free plan. Many people begrudgingly used Discord as a way to interact with the team, and for many, it was their first exposure to Discord and what we discovered is many of our team weren’t fans of the application.

What about IRC? We have used IRC since we started. Times have changed and IRC wasn’t able to compete with the slick UI and experience Slack provides. We held off from moving to Slack until we were certain we were going to be upgraded to a complimentary nonprofit account: meaning we don’t have the 10,000 message limitation and we have all of the features a paid tier account brings.

If you’re looking to interact with the Leadership Team, The Joindin Foundation board members, or just want to chat with other contributors we look forward to chatting with you in Slack.

The Joindin Foundation Officially 501c3

We’ve been waiting a while, but it’s finally official! The Joindin Foundation as officially been approved by the IRS as a 501c3 Noprofit Organization!

This means we can accept tax deductiable donations and also qualify for several nonprofit programs such as TechSoup!

The Joindin Foundation along with the Leadership Team would like to give special thanks and appreciation to Matteo Beccati and everyone in the Italian PHP community of GrUSP for the generous donation of 1,000 Euro to help fund our nonprofit incorporation costs! We wouldn’t have been able to do this without their support.

Joind.in Service Migration Maintenance Window

The Joindin Leadership team would like to announce this upcoming Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 14:00:00 pm UTC we will be performing maintenance on the joind.in domains. While we anticipate a smooth transition we are planning for the worst. The goal of the maintenance window will be to switch our production environment currently hosted by the great team at Combell to Platform.sh. The best case scenario will be a 2-3 hour window where the hosted services will be in a read only state. The worst case scenario would be all hosted services fail and DNS is reverted back to Combell as we triage what caused the issues.

Part of this move will also involve the decommissioning of legacy.joind.in. This site will no longer be accessible after the migration is complete.

We will update this post once the maintenance has been completed to give the all clear. Thanks for your understanding!

 

The Joindin Foundation

Today the Joind.in Leadership Team is excited to announce the formation of The Joindin Foundation. The Joindin Foundation is a nonprofit organization that has applied for recognition of exemption under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of The United States of America. We have the support of some really amazing people and I would like to introduce you to the founding board members: Adam Englander (Leadership Team), Beth Tucker Long (Longtime Joind.in Administrator), and myself Joe Ferguson. The three of us will oversee the nonprofit organization which will operate the Joind.in hosted service and oversee the open source project.

We would also like to announce that with the official organization comes an official address: PO Box 342457 Memphis, TN 38184. We would love for you to send us snail mail postcards and even stickers of your event!

You can also learn about what our leadership team has been working on by listening to the brand new episode of the Voices Of the Elephpant Podcast

New Joind.in Leadership Team

Hello! Welcome to Joind.in’s blog. You might have heard the hosted Joind.in service was going to be discontinued by March 31st, 2019. When this news spread across the PHP community several members came together and submitted a proposal to the current and previous Joind.in maintainers to build a new team of volunteers to take over the open source project and the hosted service. We have fantastic news to share with you: our proposal was accepted!

The leadership team was formed by volunteers responding to an open call for individuals to commit time and energy to taking over the large task of not only the Joind.in open source project but the maintenance of the hosted service. The leadership team all signed and collectively presented the proposal to the Joind.in maintainers. Meet the new Joind.in Leadership Team:

Primary Responsible Party

• Joe Ferguson
• Paul McNeely

Product Responsible Party

• Andreas Heigl
• Eric Poe

Development Responsible Party

• Jos Elstgeest (zghosts)
• Ian Littman

Security Responsible Party

• Adam Englander
• Mike Willbanks

General Responsible Party

• Michael Cullum
• David Stockton

You might have already seen a few of us going through pull requests and issues. We have added a team to the GitHub organization so you can mention the entire group as @joindin/leadership-team in issues or pull requests. If you have pending issues or pull requests please note some of us will be ramping up on the project for the first time, however, we will address issues as we come across them.

What’s Next?

The leadership team will meet on February 5th to formalize the short term plan based on knowledge transfer from the previous maintainers to the new team. The product and development side of the team will be tasked with continuing the current plan to decommission the current hosted service while launching a replacement host in parallel without utilizing legacy applications. This will mean there may be a brief period of time where the hosted service has fewer features, we’re hopeful in our work to find these features and get them ready for a contributor to work on quickly will allow us to minimize any service issues.

The current target date to decommission the current live server is March 31st, 2019 and of course is subject to change. The team will also be creating a disaster recovery plan from scratch to use as a guide for not only backing up the current system and data but to plan the new infrastructure and workflows for a more modern and efficient system. The security side of the team will be working closely in these processes as well as being tasked with ensuring all Joind.in services and systems are following industry standard protocols. If you are interested in contributing to these projects we’re using Github to plan and organize.

We Need YOU

A key part of our proposal was to ensure the longevity of the project by consistently onboarding new contributors and maintainers. This is why all of our teams have two individuals. We should constantly be cross-training and sharing knowledge not only to reduce bus factor but to teach the next generation of open source contributors.

The leadership team is committed to making participation in this project a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of the level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, or nationality via our Contributor Code of Conduct.

You are important. You are welcome here.