potentially non-exhaustive list of people in no particular order

Tom Cramer (Stanford) - associate director at Stanford library; spearheaded the hydra community effort and I guess runs partner meetings.

Mike Giarlo (Stanford) (irc: mjgiarlo) - Product owner of Sufia. Very welcoming, inclusive, and knowledgeable about everything going on in hydra code.

Mark Matienzo (DPLA) (irc: anarchivist) - not super active in technical discussions since he's more management level at this point

Justin Coyne (DCE) (irc: jcoyne) - DCE lead developer. Has touched a LOT of the hydra code. Knows a ton, is very helpful, and frequently monitors IRC / Slack / listservs. Was very helpful to me as I first learned about Hydra; helped me organize a dinner so I could ask lots of questions and continued to introduce me to tons of people at later events.

Lynette Rayle (Cornell) (irc: elrayle) - Active Sufia developer; their use cases are very similar to ours. Does a lot of work on documentation, as well (see dive into hydra works).

Erin Fahy (Stanford) - Dev Ops person at Stanford; co-facilitator of that interest group

Glen Horton (University of Chicago?) - other co-facilitator of devops group.

Alicia Cozine (DCE) - sysadmin at DCE; worked with us on our ansible scripts. I occasionally reach out directly (via slack, now) and she's always been generous / helpful.

Mark Bussy (DCE) - Runs DCE (although I think he eschews titles)

Adam Wead (Penn State) (irc: awead) - Very helpful and responsive. seems to work on solr a lot? but has also been around hydra for a long time; lots of general knowledge.

Hector Correa (Penn State) (irc: hectorcorrea1) - Also very helpful and responsive, though not around quite as frequently.

Carolyn Cole (Penn State) (irc: cam156) - not around irc as much these days. developer at Penn State; especially front-end stuff.

Karen Estlund (Penn State) (irc: kestlund) - very central to development of PCDM. now a manager in charge of lots of stuff, less involved in hydra.

Esme Cowles (Princeton) (irc: escowles) - also a fedora committer.

Jon Stroop (Princeton) (irc: jpstroop) - manages this group at princeton.

Drew Meyers (WGBH) (irc: afred) - working on HydraDAMS. Met when he TA'd the Hydra Camp I went to.

Steven Anderson (Boston Public Library) - Leads the Applied Linked Data WG

Ben Armintor (Columbia) (irc: barmintor) - also a fedora developer. Nice, smart, often has different opinions from the herd.

David Lacy (Villanova) - Lead developer at villanova. Been messing with triple stores and PCDM.

Chad Nelson (Temple) (irc: bibliotechy) - pretty new to Hydra but has also worked with Islandora

Steven Ng (Temple) (irc: nomadicoder)

Chris Beer (Stanford) (irc: cbeer) - Also a fedora committer. Heavily involved with Blacklight. Wrote engine_cart, which is a gem used to build basic applications for testing hydra ruby engines.

Nathan Rogers (Cleveland Art museum) (irc: nrogers_art) - does lots of different things. has been particularly helpful to me with resque issues.

Tom Johnson (DPLA) (irc: tjohnson) - Knows a lot about linked data. Has written a bunch of tooling around triplestores.

Trey Pendragon (Princeton) (irc: tpendragon) - Knows a lot about linked data. likes to work on caching-type projects. Helped me a lot with implementing nested attributes via hash URIs (formerly trey terrell)

Mike Tribone (Penn State) (irc: mtribone) - front-end developer / designer. Runs the Sufia UI working group.

Corey Harper (NYU) (irc: chrpr) - linked data champion. Very nice; he TA'd the Hydra Camp I went to.

Irc conventions

In general, just hop in and ask your question. If it seems comfortable, introduce yourself. Mention me or CHF so people know who you are.

If you don't get a response on IRC, you may have just hit a bad time. It's fine to re-ask on Slack (which is more persistent) or of course write to the listserv, where you'll reach a wider audience.

The channel bot is named Zoia and you can make it do stuff like give someone a coffee or a beer. You'll see people doing this and pick it up.

Increment someone's karma when they say something helpful, smart, or hilarious, e.g. HackmasterA++