The Community Advocates Program has been dissolved. Thank you for your patience while we work to deprecate these handbook pages. Please reach out to @community-team on slack if you need the Community Team's assistance. Also check out the Community Operations handbook page.
Person | Role |
---|
#community-advocates
chat channel for questions that don't seem appropriate to use the issue tracker for.@community-advocates
handle in GitLab.com to mention the team for comments in issues or MRs that require their attention.#incident-management
, #infrastructure-lounge
The goal of community advocacy is to respond to all of the GitLab mentions and questions asked online in a timely manner.
#community-advocates
, #community-relations
, #education-oss
, #swag
Slack channels and making sure that they are heard, and that we help them with our input and assistance.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.
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.
about
field on your account page is representing your current role at GitLab.If you or your team is unsure how to best collaborate on a community response, consider using one of these strategies:
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 page messages | Zapier | Zendesk | ✓ | |
Hacker News | Hacker News mentions | Zapier | Zendesk and Slack: #hn-mentions | ✓ |
Hacker News front page stories | Hacker News front page mentions | Zapier | Slack: #community-advocates | ✓ |
Education Program | Education application form | Marketo | Salesforce and Zendesk | ✓ |
Open Source Program | Open Source application form | Marketo | Salesforce and Zendesk | ✓ |
Startups Program | Startup 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 (startups@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 mentions | Zapier | Zendesk | ✓ | |
Documentation | Disqus comments | Zapier | Slack: #docs-comments | ✓ (Docs Team) |
Stack Overflow | Stack Exchange mentions | Zapier | Zendesk | ✓ |
GitLab forum | forum.gitlab.com | Zapier | Zendesk and Slack: #gitlab-forum | ✓ |
Lobste.rs | lobste.rs mentions | Zapier | Slack: #mentions-of-gitlab | ✖ |
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 | ✖ |
At this time, the Community Advocates team spans across three main timezones: CST (Chinese Standard Time, UTC +8), CET (Central European Time, UTC +1) and CDT (Central Daylight Time, UTC -5). Our typical coverage based on these time zones is Monday - Friday from 8:00UTC to 22:00UTC, plus occasional weekend coverage for release days.
While this gives us the capacity to address most mentions during the working day, often important and/or urgent mentions happen outside our current coverage times.
This is the ideal case where there is coverage from the full team and we follow the regular workflows for each one of our monitored channels.
Community Advocates Coverage Handoff: Before ending your day, please review ongoing conversations and mentions in our channels (especially #advocates-fyi in Slack) to assess whether anything could potentially become important and/or urgent. If that is the case:
advocates-fyi
Slack channel.advocates-fyi
Slack group for any urgent updates, announcements, or links to tickets. After you've reviewed and taken necessary action on these tickets, start your regular processing workflow.Community Advocates: If a member of the Community Advocates team is offline during their regular working hours (e.g. due to Paid Time Off, illness or unforeseen events) for a day or more, and that leaves their timezone uncovered, please activate the Advocate for a day process with at least two additional advocates.
If the time offline extends more than a few days, it is advisable to find additional advocates and rotate their roles.
In general, if you notice an online mention that needs to be addressed, please ping @advocates
on the #community-advocates Slack channel. All Community Advocates have notifications enabled for this group handle and this channel –notifications are also sent if the handle is mentioned on any GitLab Slack channel.
You can also contact any of the Community Advocates directly via Slack or text message.
If required, please consider using the Marketing Rapid Response Process as well.
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 a weekend, one of the advocates is assigned to monitor the traffic and to process mentions. We keep track of the assignments on the Community Advocates
GitLab team calendar. You can view our workflow page to see the advocates release day tasks.