Charlie Hull
Category: Community
This week Relevance Slack, which OSC created a few years ago, hit the milestone of 1750 users. Relevance Slack was founded to give the growing search relevance community a way to share information, tips and tricks across a wide variety of subjects, from Solr to Elasticsearch, Learning to Rank to Vector Search, Product Management and even to share job opportunities. It’s been a huge success and we’re very proud of how the community continues to grow.
Empowering the Community
Community is core to our mission at OSC to Empower Search Teams. Empowerment can take many forms, but just knowing there’s somewhere you can ask questions in a supportive and friendly environment is hugely reassuring for those working in search, many of whom are in small teams – or even the only person in their company working in this area. OSC also empowers our clients via our training and consultancy – but we know that not everyone is ready or able to engage with us in this way, and we only cover clients in North America and Europe at present (one day we hope this will change!). If you’re making your first forays into search & relevance, you have a steep learning curve ahead of you – and Relevance Slack is a great place to start.
Most of the OSC engineering team hang out in Slack, so if you’ve got a question about the judgement collection & tuning tool Quepid, you can jump into #quepid and get an answer, or try #es-learn-to-rank for the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin. We can’t answer everything of course – luckily there are many other search experts in this Slack, some of which have been working in search for decades. The #blogs-papers-books channel has a wealth of links to articles on search and relevance. If you’re looking to move into this area or for a new challenge, #jobs is full of opportunities (even with OSC – we’re hiring too!). We try to discourage vendor pitches – this is a place for everyone to learn the pros and cons of the various technical options available – and of course we prefer if the tone of conversations is polite and supportive. Those companies who like OSC provide consultancy and training in search & relevance are also welcome to join.
Come and join us
While most of us can’t attend in-person events quite yet (although we’re now planning our first US Haystack conference for some time – the CFP is open now) this online community helps us learn, give and find advice and keep connected. Long may it continue to grow! If you’re not in Relevance Slack yet, join us today.
Image by People Vectors by Vecteezy