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Missy Januszko and Warren Frame, our Co-Directors of Summit Content for 2019, have finally completed the arduous task of combing through the dozens of topic submissions from all of you in the community! The Official Agenda is now online, and is linked from the main Summit page!
Now available in “preview” is a new ebook, **PowerShell.org: History of a Community. **
There’s still a bit left to write, but this short (under 30 pages at the moment) ebook is designed to share some of what went into the building of PowerShell.org, the PowerShell Summit, and so on. The goal is to help those who may become involved with the organization in the future understand some of the decisions that have been made to this point. It’s also intended as a collection of “lessons learned” about building and nurturing a technology community in general, for anyone who might be interested. It digs a bit into the organization’s path to being a nonprofit, as well.
Grab the book now from https://leanpub.com/powershellorghistoryofacommunity. I suggest allowing Leanpub to email you when it’s updated, as it assuredly will be.
I’d very much like your feedback. Ask questions - what about the organization and its past or future isn’t currently covered? What questions does the book leave you with after you read it? What could make it more helpful, or clearer? Feel free to drop comments right here on this post, or use the book’s “Email the author(s)” link on Leanpub to send an email.
Based upon generous donations to this point, including from the Campers of DSC/DevOps Camp 2018 and the readers of The PowerShell Conference Book, we will be able to offer a greater number of scholarships that originally anticipated. As a result, we will be awarding some of those immediately.
We’re looking for a few good PowerShellers to help us keep the community on track!
As you hopefully know, we’ve opened the Call for Topics for PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2019. I know sometimes people struggle with ideas, and so I wanted to offer a few.
Richard Siddaway has decided to step away from PowerShell.org and The DevOps Collective. Most recently, Richard has been known for his management of content at PowerShell Summit North America, PowerShell Summit Europe, and later, PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit. Before that, however, Richard was one of the founders of PowerShell.org way back in 2011-2012, along with myself, Jason Helmick, Kirk Munro, and Jeffrey Hicks. It’s quite fair to say that we all needed one another’s support and expertise very much in those early days, and Richard was particularly key in helping us put together the two European Summit events. Richard’s very much entitled to one of our Community Hero Challenge Coins, which have been awarded to only a small handful of people who have made sustained, long-term community contributions: Jeffrey Snover, Jason Helmick, Angel Calvo, and Kenneth Hansen. Richard’s definitely in rarified company, and it’s well-earned.
I want to introduce you to the new PowerShell.org!
While we’re still doing a little test-and-adjust work, I’m pretty confident that everything in the new theme is working. I’d also like to point out some hopefully useful new things we’ve done with the site.
First, we’ve still got pretty much everything you’ve been used to - our friendly and helpful Q&A forums, our community-authored articles, and more. Incidentally, if you’d like to be a writer here at PowerShell.org, we welcome you. Let us help you get some eyes on whatever it is you’re creating, whether it’s a short tutorial, an article about an open source project you contribute to, or whatever. Drop a line to our webmaster@ email alias and we’ll hook you up with authoring rights.
I’ll note that our Events Calendar is currently offline; the old plugin was antiquated, and we need to find something more suitable. That’s ongoing.
We do have some new stuff, though. You’ll find **Groups **right at the top of every page, and that takes you into our new discussion groups. These are designed to foster open-ended, freeform discussion threads, unlike our more problem/solution, issue-oriented Q&A forums.
Click on your avatar at the top of the page, and you’ll switch into your new profile (incidentally, if you don’t like your avatar, you’ll need to register your email address with Gravatar.com - that’s who we pull images from). You can leave a quick Twitter- or Facebook-style status update, letting everyone know what you’ve been up to in the PowerShell world. We hope it’ll be a great way for you to update the community on your activities. Along those lines, you can specifically follow whomever you like in the community, so that their updates will bubble up to your feed. Again, your profile page is the key to accessing all that new functionality.
Once you’ve friended someone, we also now have private direct messages. From your profile, click Messages and then Compose to start creating a new message.
It’s worth spending some time poking around and see what else is available - there’s quite a bit of functionality. For example, from your profile page, choose Settings and then Email - there are quite a few email notification options that you can opt into, if you want to keep up without having to visit the site continually.
I’ll note that photo uploading from your profile page is a little touch-and-go - that’s one of the things we’re still figuring out.
**Let me give you a reason to really populate your profile: **We’re working to make this a central location for you to showcase everything you’ve accomplished in the community. Kind of like a very specialized LinkedIn profile, your PowerShell.org profile will eventually include recognitions for contributions, achievements, and more. It’ll be something you can show to colleagues, hiring managers, and peers to help show the positive impact you’re making and the milestones you’re reaching. Now’s the time to start!
We’re working hard to bring more functionality to PowerShell.org that can help you keep up with our fast-moving world, and we hope you’ll find it all useful. There’s still more to come, and we always welcome your suggestions in the Web Site Feedback forum!
We recently re-launched all of our free ebooks at https://leanpub.com/u/devopscollective. These books have all been authored by a variety of people, myself included, and most were originally authors in Word. As we translated them into Markdown (which is what Leanpub uses for its source), a few snafus tend to come up here and there.
We’re pleased to announce the re-launch of our Free eBook Store, now hosted exclusively on Leanpub. This re-launch includes 7 titles translated into Spanish by community contributor Alvaro Torres.
All eBooks are free, although you can also choose to pay any amount of $5 or more, which becomes a donation to The DevOps Collective, Inc. Leanpub offers a web-based reader and, if you “buy” the book, options to download in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats.
We used to dual-publish on Leanpub and GitBook; GitBook no longer supports ebook downloading (they’re online-only, now) and Leanpub now offers a free online reader mode, so we’re moving exclusively to Leanpub. Leanpub does offer a smartphone app as well, which you can use to manage your entire Leanpub library.
Don’t forget that all of the books’ “source” is hosted at GitHub in public open-source repositories. You’re welcome to fork the repos, submit pull requests, and so on. Note that we don’t provide technical support for the books at GitHub; please use the Forums for that. Further, while everyone appreciates suggestions for improving the books, what we really appreciate are community members who can fork the repo, implement their suggestions, and submit a pull request!
Please help us spread the word so more people can use these great, entirely-free resources!
I have managed to clear the regulatory hurdles and our OnRamp Scholarship is now open to applicants from outside the US. We will update the application materials and web pages as soon as possible, but there’s no need to wait to submit an application.
There are two caveats:
first, the option to request a laptop as part of your application is not applicable to international applicants at this time.
Second, our airfare limit is $600 USD. We cannot directly book airfare costing more. Unfortunately, we also cannot provide a partial cash reimbursement at this time. That means your air must be under $600 total (which I realize is difficult), or you need to be responsible for the entire airfare yourself. This is a bit of accounting oddness that we should be able to address in the future.
Full information and applications are at the link above.
