Add new blog post—Community manager update

_posts/2025-02-11-signing-off-community-manager.markdown

@@ -0,0 +1,158 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Signing off as Zarr's Community Manager"
+description: Summary and departure of Zarr's community manager
+date: 2025-02-11
+categories: blog
+permalink: /community-manager-update/
+---
+
+Hi everyone! 👋
+
+I hope all of you are doing great and have started using Zarr-Python 3! If not,
+install it using `pip install -U zarr` and let us know your thoughts.
+
+I have some news to share with the Zarr community—after three wonderful years
+of managing the Zarr project and its community, I’m officially stepping down as
+the community manager. My position was funded through the CZI EOSS grant, which
+finished towards the end of 2024!
+
+It’s been quite a journey and an excellent opportunity to learn, grow and
+connect with like-minded people in the scientific ecosystem. I’m fortunate that
+I was able to use my skills to contribute to the project. I’d like to specially
+thank my mentor and PI, Josh Moore. Josh has been very kind and understanding
+and has always been just, responsible and careful towards me. I couldn’t be
+more lucky to have him on my side.
+
+## Brief summary of my journey
+
+The ‘Community Manager’ role in technical projects involves wearing multiple
+hats while fostering and growing the community. It was a great opportunity
+which helped me learn a lot of new stuff. I want to highlight some of the
+essential things I’ve done in my role over the past few years.
+
+
+- ZEP—Zarr is an amazing project with lovely contributors from diverse domains
+across the globe. It’s great to see people contributing to a project and
+bringing fresh perspectives. But sometimes, this also poses a challenge. When I
+joined, discussions on the Zarr V3 specification were ongoing. There was a lot
+of good feedback on the design and what V3 specification should be, but it was
+scattered all around GitHub issues and pull requests in multiple repositories.
+We knew what we wanted to do, but there was a serious lack of a process that
+would help us get from start to finish. So, I started working on a community
+feedback process, later known as the Zarr Enhancement Proposal. If you’d like
+to read more, I wrote a [blog post](https://zarr.dev/blog/zep-inception/) back
+in 2022. The ZEP process worked great and helped us in finalising the V3
+specification (ZEP1) and Sharding specification (ZEP2).
+
+- Maintaining projects under Zarr—Looking after the community also
+serendipitously led me to take care of several repositories under the Zarr
+banner. At first, I launched the Zarr blog using Jekyll and GitHub page and
+started writing about releases, contributor guides, roadmaps, etc. Then, I
+revamped the Zarr website to add more content and launched another website to
+maintain a record of Zarr community meeting notes and community calendar at
+(<https://zarr.dev/community-calls/>). Over time, I also launched the ZEP
+website, at (<https://zarr.dev/zeps/>). While I was solidifying the Zarr online
+presence, I was also fixing bugs, assisting in releases, and sending minor
+patches to the Zarr-Python repository. I also ensured that all project licenses
+and the Code of Conduct were current and compliant, reinforcing our commitment
+to community standards and values.
+
+- Running meetings—One of the important duties of a community manager is to run
+community meetings and ensure that all the attendees feel welcome. We host
+bi-weekly meetings for the community. We also used to run ZEP meetings
+bi-weekly (which we recently stopped) to discuss ZEP proposals. Apart from both
+these meetings, I also run office hours, which I started back in early 2023.
+Office hours have been a great time for interaction with the community, where
+new/experienced users join in, and I help them with their questions. I’ve had
+some great conversations over the years with the participants — some even led
+to open-source contributions to libraries like Xarray
+(<https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/9014>).
+
+- Public speaking—I started speaking on Zarr a couple of months after joining.  I
+remember my first presentation was with Ryan Abernathy at a [Cloud Native
+Geospatial event](https://x.com/zarr_dev/status/1516722004858384386). I spoke
+about Zarr specifications and their implementations in multiple languages.
+Since then, I’ve spoken at various conferences and meet-ups. Please see my
+webpage <https://sanketverma.com/talks/> for the full list.
+
+- Representing project interests—Over the years, I have been engaged with
+multiple steering committees to represent Zarr and its community. See the
+complete list at <https://sanketverma.com/about/#open-source-engagement>. These
+steering committees drive interesting projects in the open-source ecosystem.
+For example, the Scientific Python ecosystem is a federation of
+community-developed and community-owned Python projects widely used in
+scientific research. I serve on the SPEC steering committee to represent the
+interests of Zarr.
+
+- Mentor newcomers—Onboarding newcomers to the project was yet another important
+duty of mine. Aside from mentoring users regularly, Zarr inaugurated their
+participation in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy in 2022. Both these
+programs are structured to provide a platform for motivated individuals to
+contribute to open source. Josh and I mentored a couple of interns in both
+programs.
+
+I also wanted to showcase other things on the list, but I should move on to the
+next section for now. ;)
+
+## What's changed?
+
+Since my time as the community manager has come to an end, I think it’s one of
+my responsibilities to start delegating the stuff I was responsible for to
+ensure a smooth transition. We have combined the Zarr community and the ZEP
+meetings—as I was running these meetings, we needed to make sure that meetings
+would continue to take place with minimal disruption.
+
+We’ll be reducing the frequency of Zarr office hours—currently, we hold them
+every 2 weeks, and now we plan to have them once a month. Yes, you guessed it
+right, I’ll continue to interact and assist the community during office hours.
+
+The other meetings remain unaffected on our community calendar. Our community
+calendar (<https://zarr.dev/community-calls/>) lists all the meetings and is
+open to join for everyone. Also, our ZulipChat (<https://ossci.zulipchat.com/>)
+continues flourishing and hosting great conversations; please drop by and say
+‘Hi’ to the community.
+
+## What's next?
+
+I love the project and the wonderful humans who contribute and use it. Over the
+last few years, I’ve become quite familiar with Zarr’s inner workings, both
+technical and non-technical. I’ve also acquired a lot of invaluable
+institutional knowledge of the project. I plan to continue contributing to the
+project and will participate in the meetings listed on the community calendar,
+primarily in a reduced capacity for some time. I’ve taken some time for myself
+and have been learning new stuff. Keep an eye out for my
+[blog](https://sanketverma.com/blog/). ;)
+
+I think the CZI EOSS grant was the most direct way to work and contribute to
+the project, and I’d like to wholeheartedly thank the CZI for funding us. I
+also want to thank the Zarr steering council and the open-source community for
+their collective support, feedback and encouragement throughout the years!
+
+As of today, I’m actively searching for new positions to leverage my technical
+and community leadership experience. Please ping me if you think I’m a good fit
+for your team or if you just want to have a nice chat. I’d be happy to discuss
+my experience or help you. You can find my info
+[here](https://sanketverma.com/).
+
+See you around in the meetings or probably a conference near you! ;)
+
+Peace! ✌🏻
+
+~Sanket Verma
+
+<script src="https://giscus.app/client.js"
+        data-repo="zarr-developers/blog"
+        data-repo-id="R_kgDOGxrWVg"
+        data-category="General"
+        data-category-id="DIC_kwDOGxrWVs4CU5q_"
+        data-mapping="pathname"
+        data-strict="0"
+        data-reactions-enabled="1"
+        data-emit-metadata="0"
+        data-input-position="top"
+        data-theme="light"
+        data-lang="en"
+        crossorigin="anonymous"
+        async>
+</script>