This March we are kicking off our Ambassador Program. We’ve invited six outstanding members of the balena community to join us to learn more about building with balena and to encourage other community members to do the same.
Here’s an overview of the program and an introduction to our first class of ambassadors.
What is the balena Ambassador Program?
At balena we focus on being product and user-focused, and a lot of our product feedback comes from our community of users. Every piece of feedback we get from our community and customers goes into internal brainstorms and ideation with the goal of improving our product.
We have set up the Ambassador Program to recognize and empower community members who have made outstanding contributions to the balena ecosystem. Our goal: to continue building with balena and to inspire our community.
What does being a balena Ambassador entail?
We think of our Ambassadors as leaders within the balena community. The role includes building projects with balena and blogging about them, supporting other users in the forums, and also representing balena at physical and digital events.
To support their role in the community, ambassadors will be invited to join focus groups to give feedback on new products and features we have in development. They’ll also receive invites to balena events, join regular round tables, and learn more about the balena roadmap. And of course, they will also be the recipients of unique balena ambassador swag!
Meet our Ambassadors
We are very excited to introduce you to our ambassadors, who join us from across the globe to champion the balena community:
- Nico Maas (GitHub, Twitter) is an engineer and scientist focused on research rockets, and has literally sent balena into space! His area of focus is onboard computer development and replacement, and balenaOS was onboard one of his launches.
- Alex Lennon (GitHub, Twitter) is at the heart of our Northern UK community, operating from DoES Liverpool and building IoT projects across many sectors. Alex has been active in our community since our resin.io days, and knows exactly when a project calls for balenaCloud to help ease the burden of deploying IoT devices.
- David Groom (GitHub, Twitter) is a maker, hacker, roboticist, IoT enthusiast, drone flyer, 3D printer expert, and community member extraordinaire. If you are building a project, chances are “IshotJR” has built it, or at least thought about building it, and can offer you some advice on potential pitfalls to avoid.
- Alex Kremer (GitHub) is our youngest Ambassador, but he has been all over balena and is the builder and owner of the ever popular Minecraft Server application, one of the first and most deployed community apps on the Hub!
- Mark Chester (GitHub) is an active community member and contributor to the popular balenaSound project, helping to guide new users, troubleshoot issues, and offer advice in our Forums. If you have a streaming audio question, Mark will probably have an answer.
- Billy Glenn (GitHub, Twitter) undertook a massive balena-powered IoT Christmas Tree project last year that not only taught him about containers, and pushing them over-the-air, but also some electronics, 3D printing, drone photography, and more. And with only 8 months to go until the holiday season is upon us again, who knows what he is already cooking up for this year!
- Mithun Das (GitHub, Twitter) is an IoT and machine learning expert who is combining those skills to build innovative Edge AI projects using balena. Mithun has published Apps on balenaHub, been featured on Hackster, and enjoys teaching IoT as much as learning.
Are you the next balena Ambassador?
We’re rolling out the program slowly to ensure we get it right, learn and iterate, and improve it for the Ambassadors, and ultimately, our community. Once we have a solid foundation, we will be looking to expand membership.
So, if you’re a balena developer building IoT and edge projects, participating in our community, fixing bugs via GitHub, and/or helping out balena users, keep doing what you’re doing and make sure to let us know about it. This includes:
- sharing your project on balenaForums,
- mentioning us in a post about your balena project on social media,
- or submitting your app to balenaHub
Also keep your eyes peeled for when we release the application form for you to join the program!
Come and join us as part of the balena community
We have thousands of balena enthusiasts discussing, building, and sharing their experience of balena on our forums, which are open to anyone. You can join us here → forums.balena.io
If you’re not familiar with balena, or our products, visit our website or get to know what balena applications are like by checking out balenaHub. You can find a starter project to get to know our tools, or build your own application with our premade blocks. Our friendly community and balena team are hanging out in our forums if you need a hand.
You can also keep up to date with everything going on at balena by following us on social media, just scroll to the bottom of the page to find us everywhere we are on the internet.
You can find out what other features we have in progress, let us know about what you’d like to see us developing and upvote features on our public roadmap.
