This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I’ve been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it’s time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

What Does Joind.in Need?

It needs people who believe in it to participate in whatever way appeals to you! Off the top of my head:

• respond to incoming questions and contact emails
• manually check and approve events (the volume of spam we get is surprising, events are manually approved)
• look after live servers and platform (actually just about to get an upgrade from our lovely sponsors Combell)
• review and merge pull requests across the repos in our Github organisation
• contribute features and bug fixes (in particular the admin features on the legacy site aren’t all available on the new site yet, please help!)
• maintain the issue tracker, keeping it tidy and tagging issues, replicating bugs
• managing the @joindin twitter account – responding to questions and we often like to tweet to promote events and CfPs as well
• also: the development platform and the mobile apps do have maintainers but I know that help would be very welcome in those areas too!

If you’re interested, you don’t need permission before taking action, please step in with the above and anything else you wish was happening around joind.in. We use IRC for project communication so find us on freenode in the #joind.in channel and let us know if there’s anything you want to do that you need help, advice or additional user permissions for! There’s always people around in the channel to talk to.

So You’re Abandoning The Project?

In the first instance, no. We’ll endeavour to keep the lights on, events approved, email support going and security fixes etc applied. I guess if we aren’t pushed aside by a rush of people who believe the project has a future, then that might change, but for now there is no emergency.

Open source is most powerful when we pursue our passions and my journey as a speaker and event host over the last 8 years or so would have looked very different without joind.in. At this point and after a major recent job change, I’m excited about many other things and this project that has taught me so much in terms of PHP development and technical leadership is no longer high enough up my extensive todo list to get the regular attention it deserves. If the project isn’t important, it will keep on winding down. If it is important, the community will pick it up – this wasn’t originally my project, and now it is time to hand it forward.