In 2022, we made several changes to make it easier to connect with the FreeSWITCH community. These changes brought the community closer to each other and with the FreeSWITCH experts. It was a busy year, so we summarized a few highlights below.

Community Resources

We started the year off welcoming Alex Rowell as the new community manager for both FreeSWITCH and SignalWire. She’s a great person to reach out to if you have any questions about anything related to FreeSWITCH, and you can find her in our Slack channel or in the new community forum. She even did a presentation about the FreeSWITCH project and community at ClueCon, which you can watch here.

One of the first things we sent out during the year was a community survey where we got some great feedback from everyone who participated. If you missed this survey, don’t worry - we’ll be sending out more soon. You can read more about the results here. Look out for the next survey in early 2023 if you have suggestions you want to share with us. As an open source project, FreeSWITCH requires community contributions and feedback, and so we encourage you to be on the lookout for this next survey.

Over the summer, we brought back a regular community call, which we’ve named FreeSWITCH Office Hours. In the past, ClueCon Weekly used to be the community call where you could gather and ask questions, but over the last few years it has transformed into our weekly webshow. With the help of Brian West and other FreeSWITCH developers, we’ve revived this call to give the community a comfortable and productive space to bring their questions and issues. We are now hosting Office Hours twice a month in order to give as many people as possible the access they need to FreeSWITCH experts and resources. If you need anything related to FreeSWITCH, you can jump into any of these community calls the first or third Tuesday of each month at 9 AM PT. You can also sign up to get a reminder email and add to the agenda.

October was a big month for FreeSWITCH. We invited ClueCon attendees to join our new community forum and we’re now encouraging everyone to join. It won’t be replacing our community Slack, but we want it to be a more consistently searchable place for questions and resources. If you’re primarily using our mailing list to get help, or even Slack, we hope you’ll join the forum while it’s young! This will be a great place to get help quickly between office hours or if you can’t make it.

2022 FreeSWITCH Updates and #ClueCon2022

We started the week of ClueCon by dropping a new FreeSWITCH release, so make sure you’re up to date! We released v1.10.8, which is a minor release containing important bug fixes and stability improvements. View the release notes here.

If you missed #ClueCon2022, the fun and informative presentations from the week are all available on the FreeSWITCH YouTube channel. In addition to all the presentations, we also hosted some interesting panels this year. Tuesday featured an open source roundtable with guests from not only the FreeSWITCH project, but also Kamailio, OpenSIPS, and HOMER. Wednesday featured an Ask a VC panel, where our top-notch investors spoke about some of the key things they look for in a growing company, or entrepreneur, before they make a move.

We were so excited to be back fully in person for ClueCon this year. However, this was the final October ClueCon, and next year we’re going back to hosting the conference in the summer (August 14th-17th). Because it was October, we took full advantage of the season to throw attendees a Halloween party and costume contest. Next year might not be as spooky, but as always, we’ll be bringing back the Gigabit Reception and our annual poker tournament. As well as other networking activities… stay tuned to find out more.

The week wrapped up with James Body’s return to ClueCon for Dangerous Demos. Participants presented demos that had to get dangerous in 3 minutes or less. They even bribed attendees in the audience with Golden Tickets to win votes in their favor, to receive the coveted crystal Dangerous Demos trophies. If you’re suffering from FOMO, don’t worry. All of this is available to watch on our YouTube channel.

If that FOMO is getting to you even more after watching some of these ClueCon videos, don’t miss out on ClueCon next year! Early Bird registration is open. This is our best deal on tickets - the early bird sale means you get $700 off if you register by February 28th! FreeSWITCH 101 training is also available for purchase and will be held on Friday, August 18th after ClueCon. Don’t want to miss out on FreeSWITCH updates and other events in the community? Make sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter and that you’re on our slack channel or the new community forum.

See you next year!