Lincoln goes to Montreal: A glimpse inside Vanilla Forums, Inc
Linc
Admin
A few times a year I show up at Vanilla HQ in Montreal. We do have a strong remote contingent: @lvez (ceo), Jeremy (vp sales), and Cas (sales) all split their time between home and the office, while Laura & Patrick (support) both work remotely all the time like me.
But, most of the team is in the office all the time: @Todd, @Tim, @JohnAshton & @beckyvb (devs), @Adrian (marketing), @FreddyP & Terrance (sales), Julie (customer success), Derrick (project mgmt), and Jess (office asst).
Tuesday will mark the first time all current employees have been in the same room. 
I've arrived a bit early so I'm spending Sunday morning at the office. I'll grab some better pics when other folks are around, but I snapped my view of the Official Vanilla Timekeeping Center from where I'm sitting while I'm here. 
We're going out Tuesday night to celebrate a company milestone. It's not for me to share the exact milestone, but it will suffice to say: we're doing well and knocking out our internal goals. 
And hey, we're hiring in Montreal currently: http://vanillaforums.com/hiring I don't think they're currently hiring technical folks outside the province currently. Either I've ruined it for everyone or it's just the generous Montreal tax credits that make it far more affordable for a small company to hire here. Feel free to apply from anywhere, just setting expectations early.
Comments
The milestone is
Vanilla Forums COO [GitHub, Twitter, About.me]
@linc, great idea and thanks for the warning about the pics
A bit too far to apply, but it would not have been a bad idea.
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Lo, I have arrived and claimed Developer Isle in the name of Lincoln.
Current status: fashioning a flag out of rubber bands and juice boxes.
This would go real well on that wall !!
❌ ✊ ♥. ¸. ••. ¸♥¸. ••. ¸♥ ✊ ❌
It's a good first step, Lincoln, but I always think that the key to Risk - the office version is the stationery cupboard.
Secure that, and victory is virtually assured.
A comment and few questions come to mind.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
A video of me scrambling from my positioned laptop onto that desk in the 3-second Photo Booth countdown would've undoubtedly been even funnier than the photo that resulted.
Oh no, we have been invaded by the Americans! Is this revenge for the War of 1812?
Send help!
Customer Success Manager at Vanilla Forums
A lot of the team gathered in the dev room for a social / working lunch today.
@peregrine This is where we shave yaks; the storage/network closet.
I washed the hoof prints off the wall before taking the photo.
I just gave a half-hour presentation to most of the company on our open source community. I'll attach my slide deck if you're interested to see how we're thinking about things.
It's a quick recap (most of the company doesn't have much knowledge of the community), a current status, and a look ahead. Unfortunately some context is lost without me talking of course but I think you'll get the gist of it.
A++ would read again.
Exciting times, glad to be here.
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@Linc: Thanx for the insights in the presentation. I love the sandfox.
I have ben crucified more than once outlining and discussing why Open Source Matters. Interesting perspective change. I hope the whirlwind you set will act upon the community like a good dose of an transcended portion of LSD
Never say it's too late, but it will be hard to tell those who already left.
I understand why it seems like a change from the outside. From the inside, we have never wavered from open source; it's been a question of immediate priorities, cost-benefit tradeoff, and our available resources.
We used those 2 years of being stuck on 2.0.18 to solidify our market position and ensure the future of the company with the limited resources we had.
There was a time we felt like we were competing with open source for some clients because our value-add wasn't so big. Now our value-add is astronomical. Our infrastructure alone would make any other forum product team cry like babies.
Our support & success team is making our internal metrics shine and freeing up developers for more development work.
We're not risking nearly as much now AND we're seeing the open source community step up and contribute more, so we can safely place bigger bets on open source and that's easier to sell internally.
We have exactly the community I want right now.
I just wanted to pop in and say that, as a newcomer to Vanilla (both the company and the product), @Linc's talk was great. I really enjoyed learning more about the open source side of things after having been immersed in the cloud side of things for the last couple of months.
It's clear that Linc has tremendous respect for the contributors and posters here in the open source community and he really helped someone like me to understand why open source is something Vanilla, as a company, has continued to encourage and to support.
As for myself, I hope to pop in to this community more frequently to talk about community stuff going forward. I'm not a coder or a dev, but would like to be able to talk about people's Vanilla communities and their experiences.
Again, thanks to @Linc for the talk and I hope to pop in here more often.
Customer Success Manager at Vanilla Forums
I am glad Linc has been recruiting from the creme of the crop !! way to go @Linc !!!
PS Yes bring more women, I feel marginalized ...
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Open Source is the way to go to grow!
Cloud is the future.
The presentation look good and hit all the right stuff.
Sounds great, are there any plans you can share with us? I mean Open Source is not a top down thing, it unfolds perfectly if the community has access to a lot of things they can organize, think and code together.
@vrijvlinder: More women would be great. Does anyone have access to women webmaster and coder-boards, blogs or news sites? Any possibilty proactivly introducing Vanilla there? I could dig the Vanillaskins theme buyers list for female names and invite them here probably?
We have some really solid collaboration goals already:
We also have plans to do things like refactor Tagging & Reactions into core features in the near-term, and other revamp goals. For these kinds of tasks, there is a huge communication overhead to explaining our internal lessons learned and why things need to work a certain way in some epic explanation post. It's never going to happen here on the forum; you have to make yourselves part of the development process on GitHub, not wait for us to explain our roadmap in a slideshow.
//revised for better clarity of goals & brevity