Community Advocacy

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Finding the Community Advocates

On this page

Community Advocate Resources

Role of Community Advocacy

Goal

The goal of community advocacy is to grow the number of active GitLab content contributors. We do this by increasing conversion in the contributor journey.

Plan

  1. Have discount codes that are easily distributed by team members
  2. Send every major contributor a personalized gift
  3. Host online sessions for content contributors
  4. Start keeping track of our core contributors
  5. Do the rest of the contributor journey

Vision

  1. GitLab has 1000's of active content contributors (e.g. for blogs, meetups, presentations, etc.)
  2. Being a core contributor is a very rewarding experience
  3. There are 10's of active GitLab/ConvDev meet-ups
  4. 100's of talks per year given at conferences and meetups
  5. Our most active content contributors come to our summits
  6. 100's of people contribute content about GitLab every month
  7. We use software that helps us to keep track of core contributors (can be forum, Highrise, software made for advocacy, or a custom Rails app)
  8. There is a core contributors page organized per region with the same information as the team page and what they contributed, where they work (if they have a linkedin profile), and a button to sent them an email via a form.
  9. We measure and optimize every step of the contributor journey

Respond to every community question about GitLab asked online

Community response channels

The Community Advocates actively monitor and respond to the following set of channels.

In this overview:

CHANNEL SOURCE AUTOMATION DESTINATION ACTIVE?
@gitlab Twitter mentions Zendesk Zendesk ✓
@movingtogitlab Twitter mentions Zendesk Tweetdeck ✓
@gitlabstatus Twitter mentions Zendesk Zendesk ✓
Facebook Facebook page messages Zapier Zendesk ✓
Hacker News Hacker News mentions Zapier Zendesk and Slack: #hn-mentions ✓
Education initiative Education application form Marketo Salesforce and Zendesk ✓
Open Source initiative Open Source application form Marketo Salesforce and Zendesk ✓
E-mail (merch@gitlab.com) Shop contact E-mail alias Zendesk ✓
E-mail (community@gitlab.com) Handbook E-mail alias Zendesk ✓
E-mail (movingtogitlab@gitlab.com) #movingtogitlab campaign (deprecated) E-mail alias Zendesk ✓
E-mail (education@gitlab.com) Support contact E-mail alias Zendesk ✓
E-mail (opensource@gitlab.com) Support contact E-mail alias Zendesk ✓
E-mail (personal inbox) E-mails to track as tickets E-mail alias Zendesk ✓
Website: blog Disqus comments Zapier Zendesk, #mentions-of-gitlab ✓
Website: DevOps Tools Disqus comments Zapier Zendesk and Slack: #devops-tools-comments ✓
Speakers Find-a-speaker form Zapier Zendesk ✓
Reddit Reddit mentions Zapier Zendesk and Slack: #reddit ✓
Documentation Disqus comments Zapier Slack: #docs-comments ✓ (Docs Team)
Lobste.rs lobste.rs mentions Zapier Slack: #mentions-of-gitlab ✖
Stack Exchange Stack Exchange mentions N/A N/A ✖
GitLab forum forum.gitlab.com N/A N/A ✖
IRC IRC support N/A N/A ✖
Gitter Gitter support N/A N/A ✖
YouTube YouTube comments N/A N/A ✖
Mailing list GitLabHq Google Group (deprecated) N/A N/A ✖
Quora GitLab Quora topic N/A N/A ✖
Wider community content Blog post comments N/A N/A ✖

How we work

Deliverable scheduling

Release advocate duty

Every 22nd of the month we release a new version of GitLab. More often than not we get a spike in community mentions. To help deal with this we have dedicated release advocates that own the effort of responding to community mentions on/after a release.

Every month a different advocate has release advocate duty. It rotates on a monthly basis. If the release day takes place on weekend, one of the advocates is assigned to monitor the traffic and to process mentions.

The two channels that we see the biggest increases in are:

Involving experts

As Community Advocates, we will often want to involve experts in a topic being discussed online. The Involving experts workflow section describes how we do it.

Can you please respond to this?

You got a link to this because we'd like you to respond to the mentioned community comment. We want to make sure we give the best answer possible by connecting the wider community with our experts and expose you to more community feedback.

When responding to community mentions, you should check out the social media guidelines. Please answer in the social channel that the comment was originally posted in - discussing it internally via Slack makes it impossible for the community member to interact.

If you can't respond to the linked comment, that's OK, but please quickly let the person who pinged you know so they can ping someone else.

Initiatives

Education / OSS

While we're restructuring our handbook, this topic has now moved to the Education/open Source workflow section.

Supporting community initiatives

When we see outstanding articles about GitLab from our wider community, we should acknowledge the author.

Please include the link to that article in this Google Doc. Our evangelist team will proceed from there.

advocate-for-a-day

When community advocates aren't available, or we expect high traffic on social media (because of some major outage, or some significant announcement), we should try to recruit more Gitlabbers who would help us cover our social networks.

A good way to quickly organize these volunteers is using:

#movingtogitlab

During news cycles such as the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, there may be a an increase in new GitLab users. If so, advocates may need to reinitiate the @movingtogitlab Twitter account and/or respond to the Twitter hashtag #movingtogitlab to welcome these accounts. The #movingtogitlab workflow list some example responses and etiquette.

Expertises

Every Community Advocate owns one or more of the processes that the CA team uses. These are called expertises.

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