With the first day of this year’s Hadoop Summit in Dublin underway, all kinds of operational aspects emerged to the surface in the discussions taking place, from the nitty-gritty development to the marketing and community relations side of involved companies.

Joshua Woodward, developer relations manager at Hortonworks, Inc., sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about Hortonworks’ new community engagement and question-solving hub.

Building the hub

Woodward started things off by stating Hortonworks’ position on bringing its users into a sense of connectedness, saying, “We want to reach out to the community, and we have several ways of doing that.” To that end, Hortonworks’ new community engagement hub, which is a part of its Community Connection platform, allows users, developers and anyone else interested in engaging in problem-solving for connected issues to come and share their knowledge.

“The community can go and ask questions and get answers from the experts,” Woodward said. He added, “We want it to be a place where anyone can get an answer.”

Another aspected of Hortonworks’ community engagement initiative comes in the form of its Future of Data meetups, which take place internationally, but are locally organized by volunteers looking to connect with the company. This has Hortonworks looking ahead to growing the number of meetups, as well as looking for local leaders to head them and provide firm roots for the company.

Answers for the community

Moving discussion back to the community engagement hub, Woodward spoke on how it is changing user engagement. As the networked individuals provide answers to questions from simple (such as Spark installation) to complex (node management and discrete networking), he said, “It’s bringing the community together: Anyone can ask a question; anyone can answer it. It gives direct access to the engineers writing the software.”

With quick answer turnaround time measured in minutes, and a gamification approach that provides rankings and achievements for the most helpful contributors, the hub is aimed to continue developing ways of bringing people in to help each other.

As a coordinator for the international chapters of local meetups, Woodward was asked how he saw the geographical differences affecting people on a cultural level, but he felt that developers around the world tend to be largely the same, from a fondness for cats to enjoyment of clear achievement.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Hadoop Summit 2016 – Dublin. And make sure to join in during theCUBE’s live coverage during the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE