#community-relations chat channel for questions that don't seem appropriate to use the issue tracker for.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.
Social Response Time is the time between an inbound message and the first-reply time. The current goal is to be under 7 hours for all channels and under 5 hours for high-priority channels. This response time is currently tracked in Zendesk.
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 | ✓ |
| 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 mentions | Zapier | Zendesk and Slack: #reddit | ✓ | |
| Documentation | Disqus comments | Zapier | Slack: #docs-comments | ✓ (Docs Team) |
| Stack Overflow | Stack Exchange mentions | Zapier | Zendesk | ✓ |
| Lobste.rs | lobste.rs mentions | Zapier | Slack: #mentions-of-gitlab | ✖ |
| 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 | ✖ |
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.
The two channels that we see the biggest increases in are:
#release-post Slack channel throughout the day to be ready at the time the release blog post is publishedAs 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.
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.
While we're restructuring our handbook, this topic has now moved to the Education/open Source workflow section.
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.
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.
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 GitLab team-members who would help us cover our social networks. Our Advocate for a Day page is meant to help assist anyone who has been asked to perform this duty.
Every Community Advocate owns one or more of the processes that the CA team uses. These are called expertises.
