As Great Expectations has become our full-time thing, we’ve steadily zeroed in on ways to engage with developers, contributors, and partners.
By now, we’ve settled on several formats that are working really well. Some are free and some are paid. This blog post explains them all and provides links to set up calls and schedules, so that you can pick and choose the formats that work best for you.
Heads up: the community is growing quickly and the project is evolving, so our ability to support some of the more high-touch formats may not last forever.
Free options:
Options where money changes hands:
Options that are free as in beer
All of these options are free. We invest a lot of time in them because they’re a great way to learn from the community.
Note: Great Expectations itself is also free as in beer. It’s licensed as Apache 2.0 and everything in the open source project will stay open source forever. Full disclosure: we do plan to develop paid software on top of Great Expectations at some point in the future. The core project will always be open.
1. Slack
If you have any doubts about the best way to get in touch, please start with our public Slack channel. We’re happy to answer all kinds of questions, or just talk shop about data work.
www.greatexpectations.io/slack
Someone from the core team will typically be available during U.S. working hours. We’re scheduling around normal levels of focused maker time, meetings, lunches, yoga classes, etc. so you might sometimes catch us away from our desks. You can sometimes catch us on nights and weekends, too, because we’re nerds that way.
You can learn more about our current on-call system here.
2. Github
If you have a specific feature request or bug to report, please use Github issues.
We also welcome pull requests. Please check out the Contributor docs to get started.
Options where money changes hands
Money can be exchanged for goods and services, in this case consulting services.
3. Open source support contracts
...are for companies that want support for setting up and maintaining Great Expectations within their data infrastructure, and direct communication with the maintainers of the project. It’s also a great way to contribute to the community by covering some of the financial cost of development.
Aside from detailed review and recommendations for how to incorporate Great Expectations into your codebase, infrastructure, and workflow.
We offer:
- White glove support for deployment of Great Expectations in your environment: architecture review, team tutorials, and pair programming during the first two weeks of setup.
- Support and maintenance for features that are in "beta" or better.
- Regular check-ins with a core contributor to Great Expectations.
- Ability to request prioritized features (within reason) on the Great Expectations roadmap.
- Firm commitments on release dates for features on the roadmap.
If something along these lines sounds appealing, please contact us us at partnerships@superconductive.com.
4. Lighthouse partnerships
Superconductive also works closely with select companies for lighthouse partnerships. In most cases, our partner teams:
- are building or improving essential data infrastructure,
- see tooling for speed and analytic integrity in their data workflows as a critical component of their next phase, and
- have selected Great Expectations as their tool of choice for data testing and documentation.
Lighthouse partnerships take the form of staff augmentation, with members of the Superconductive team embedding closely with your team, participating in planning and sprint meetings, and owning sprint tickets. Past projects have included
- data warehouse architecture and schema design
- ETL and data normalization
- large-scale data quality initiatives
- workshops and extended training on tools and best practices for DataOps
- development of tooling for machine learning versioning, etc.
Our only requirement is that deploying Great Expectations be part of the scope of work, with some time reserved for making improvements to Great Expectations that are aligned with your roadmap. The goal is to co-develop features that are immediately useful for your team, and can eventually be shared with the broader Great Expectations community.
If something along these lines sounds appealing, please contact us at partnerships@superconductive.com.
