2021 mattermost community awards

The 2021 Mattermost Community Awards

As we close out the 2nd year of a pandemic that has disrupted social life across the globe, distributed communities have become more important than ever as an outlet for social interaction, creative pursuits, and other collaborative efforts. In 2021, more than 3,400 people participated in the Mattermost community to merge code, provide translations, improve documentation, help others deploy and administer Mattermost instances, make feature requests, and report issues. 

We value these community members immensely, and we think it’s important to highlight all the great work they do. To that end, we’ve decided to recognize a select group of contributors who’ve invested significant personal time and effort to make Mattermost better. Mattermost wouldn’t be what it is today without contributors like these, and we want to recognize vital community members as part of our everyday practice.

How We Chose Winners

We built an initial list of nominees by circulating a nomination form internally and by looking at contributor data in tools we use, including Orbit and Bitergia. From this list, we evaluated all contributors according to two metrics: 

  1. A quantitative measure of their total contributions across all platforms weighted according to our orbit model version. 
  2. A qualitative evaluation based on the key traits we value in community members, including how welcoming and respectful they are, the number of types of contributions they make, their ability to follow through on commitments, and more. 

The details of these rankings are beyond the scope of this article, but they gave us a relative position to start our evaluation. From here, we analyzed each contributor to understand the context behind their interactions better and to make sure we had a complete picture of what these contributors have accomplished.

Without further ado, let’s get to the winners!

Top Overall Mattermost Contributors

These top contributors went above and beyond this year to have an immensely positive impact on our community. They are presented in no particular order.

Tom De Moor

Tom joined our community in 2020 and has since become a top-notch representative of each of our community values. To start, he’s been extremely active in our product localization process where he maintains the Dutch language translations and actively helps newcomers onboard into the localization process. He’s also highly active on our community server, where he has invested significant time in building trust with our community and provided feedback on a wide range of topics, from product design to documentation. Last, but certainly not least, he has published multiple outstanding articles on our blog about how to use Mattermost and has appeared on the What Matters podcast to discuss some of the ways he’s used the platform to work with communities affected by COVID-19.

JtheBAB

JtheBAB has been contributing to Mattermost since 2018 and has been a consistently positive force in our community ever since. To start, he’s a major contributor to German language translations, and he has provided a regular drip of improvements and bug reports to a handful of Mattermost GitHub repos. He’s also been very active on our community server to help other community members solve problems they face, and he always demonstrates our community values in every interaction.

Haardik Dharma

Haardik joined our community in late 2020 and is truly symbolic of all the traits we value most in our community. He’s earned trust by seamlessly integrating himself into our process for contributing PRs to solve existing issues across multiple Mattermost components, and he consistently follows through with all of his commitments. He was also a massive help during the initial launch of Mattermost Boards where he provided valuable feedback and bug reports. To top it all off, he frequently goes above and beyond to help other community members on GitHub and our community server.

Yusuke Nemoto

Yusuke is proof that you can have a huge impact on an open source community without contributing large volumes of code. To start, he’s our unofficial Japanese diplomat and has been at the center of our community growth in Japanese audiences. He dedicates considerable time to maintaining Japanese translations of Mattermost release announcements on his personal blog and is highly active in our localization community for Japanese translations. He’s also active on social media, where he maintains our community-run Japanese Twitter account. All the while, Yusuke contributes code to multiple Mattermost repos regularly.

Jan-Peter Rusch

Jan-Peter demonstrates the diversity of opportunities that are available to contribute to Mattermost. We hardly have a community platform he doesn’t participate in, and you can catch him working on product documentation, German translations, providing product feedback in our community chat, reporting product bugs, and onboarding newcomers, among other things. In every case, he’s always helpful and supportive to the community members he interacts with, and that’s the sort of thing that makes the Mattermost community so wonderful.

Top New and Emerging Mattermost Contributors

We also want to recognize new contributors who have made a significant impact and return contributors who have made significant efforts to increase their involvement in our community this year.

Andrew Henke

Andrew takes the cake for being a huge help to other community members in our support forums and on our community chat server. His efforts have helped countless Mattermost users across the world debug and configure their Mattermost instances. He has unrivaled attention to technical detail when it comes to the problems others face. Most importantly, he’s truly emblematic of our contributor kindness guidelines in every interaction he has.

Julien Fabre

Julien first joined our community during Hacktoberfest 2020, and he’s grown his presence this year through early contributions to Boards, including a substantial number of unit tests during our most recent Hacktoberfest event. He’s exceptionally attentive to the code review cycle and was named MVP for Mattermost v6.2.

Andrey Eremchenko

Andrey was one of our first community contributors to Boards and has been one of our most active contributors ever since. He routinely steps in to help solve the problems of other community members with thoughtful PRs and strong attentiveness to code review cycles.

Anne-Laure Gaillard

Anne-Laure is our very first community QA tester and has been extremely active with UI/UX testing on multiple Mattermost components. She helped us pioneer a new effort that has enabled us to open the doors to our QA process to anyone from our external community. We genuinely appreciate the input she provided during this time. She also contributed a handful of French translations and is a model of our community values, and is always a positive presence.

William Gathoye

William has been a long-term community member with code submissions dating all the way back to 2016, with consistent participation in multiple aspects of our community, including running our French community Twitter account, where he made 2021 the most active year yet. This year, William also helped us grow into more experimental mediums like live streaming, and produced a wonderful series of video guides in French on our community French YouTube account.

Honorable Mentions

The toughest challenge of awards like these is that we risk leaving awesome people out. To that end, we also want to recognize more community members who have stood out over the last year.

Looking Forward to 2022

A massive thanks goes out to all of these contributors; if your name is listed here, we’ll be reaching out soon with details about what you’ve won! 2022 looks to be another wonderful year for the Mattermost community, and we want to provide more opportunities to get involved than ever before. In fact, you can join our ongoing desktop app contributor event right now! You can also find other ways to get involved, or sign up for our newsletter to receive updates about future events. While you’re at it, stop by our Community server and say hello.

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Ben Lloyd Pearson is the Director of Developer Marketing for Mattermost. He is a technology generalist who focuses his broad understanding to grow and engage developer audiences through digital media, open source advocacy, and events strategy and operations.