Community Advocacy

Finding the Community Advocates

Community Advocacy Issue Tracker; please use confidential issues for topics that should only be visible to team members at GitLab.
Chat channel; please use the #community-advocates chat channel for questions that don't seem appropriate to use the issue tracker for.

Emergency contact

Relevant Slack channels for incident/infrastructure: #incident-management, #infrastructure-lounge
Director of Infrastructure: @gerir (on Slack)
Advocates contact
1. Emily Cook: @ecook, phone number on Slack profile, timezone UTC-5
2. Đorđe Šumenković - @dsumenkovic, timezone UTC+1
3. Borivoje 'Bora' Tasovac - @btasovac, phone number on Slack profile, timezone UTC+1
Community Advocate response flow
Incident management roles

Finding the Community Advocates
- Emergency contact
Community Advocate Resources
Role of Community Advocacy
How we work
Coverage for important and/or urgent mentions
Deliverable scheduling
Release day advocate duty
- Release day tasks
Involving experts
- Can you please respond to this?
Initiatives
Advocate for a Day
Expertises
Relevant Links

Community Advocate Resources

Community Advocate Onboarding
- Onboarding
Community Advocate Bootcamp
- Bootcamp

Role of Community Advocacy

Goal

The goal of community advocacy is to respond to all of the GitLab mentions and questions asked online in a timely manner.

Plan

Have discount codes that are easily distributed by team members
Send every major contributor a personalized gift
Expand the coverage of all GitLab mentions.
Improve responsiveness on high priority channels.
Do the rest of the contributor journey

Vision

GitLab has 1000's of active content contributors (e.g. for blogs, meetups, presentations, etc.)
Being a core contributor is a very rewarding experience
There are 10's of active GitLab/ConvDev meet-ups
100's of talks per year given at conferences and meetups
Our most active content contributors come to our summits
100's of people contribute content about GitLab every month
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)
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.
We measure and optimize every step of the contributor journey

Respond to every community question about GitLab asked online

This includes helping members of the community with their questions, but also making sure that the community is heard and that the feedback from the community reaches the rest of the team at GitLab.
Engage with the developer community in a way that is direct but friendly and authentic. Be able to carry the tone of the GitLab brand while also giving the proper answers or direction to members of the community.
Engage with experts in the GitLab team to provide the best quality answers and to expose them to community feedback.
Help update the social media guidelines and GitLab voice as new situations arise.
Explore different tools from Zendesk to Mentions to find a way to track all mentions of GitLab across the internet.
Don’t be afraid of animated gifs and well-placed humor! We are not robots.
Work within the GitLab process to help users report bugs, make feature requests, contact support, and provide feedback on the product.

Respond to every question asked internally

This includes helping GitLab team members with their questions across the #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.
Make sure to enable the Slack notifications for all the new messages in the channels mentioned above
Help the team with tailoring and reviewing the drafts of their responses going online.

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.

Community response channels

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

In this overview:

Those channels not marked as active need a response workflow to be put in place and are currently monitored on an occasional basis.
Each channel has a link to the workflow in place to process responses

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	✓
Hacker News front page stories	Hacker News front page mentions	Zapier	Slack: #community-advocates	✓
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 (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	Reddit mentions	Zapier	Zendesk and Slack: #reddit	✓
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	✖

How we work

Coverage for important and/or urgent mentions

At this time, the Community Advocates team spans across two main timezones: 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. An example is HackerNews mentions happening towards the end of business hours or later in the Pacific Timezone (UTC-8).

With the full team online

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: before ending your day, please review ongoing conversations and mentions in our channels to assess whether there is any one of them that could potentially become important and/or urgent. If that is the case,

Involve the relevant experts as you would generally do. Let them know you are going offline at the end of your workday and ask them to monitor the channel or find someone on their team who can do it while you're out.
Let the rest of the Community Relations know about the mention by posting a message on the #community-advocates Slack channel with the link. That gives the ability for team members with different working hours to monitor and act on the mentions.
Post a link to the mention on the relevant Slack channels for the topic: #ceo, #marketing, #product, #competition are some examples where important mentions are usually posted.

With a team member offline

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.

After hours

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.

Deliverable scheduling

Team meetings are on Tuesday
One on one's are on Thursday
All deliverables are expected to be completed by Friday of the running week
- Lots of time to complete
- Enough time to review
- Enough time for resolving potential problems
- Small deliverables force small/fast iterations
All deliverables are expected to be merged by Tuesday
For every handbook update (that substantially changes the content or layout), please follow the handbook guidelines

Release day 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 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 day tasks

Consider engaging with an Advocate-for-a-day in advance
Monitor the #release-post Slack channel throughout the day to be ready at the time the release blog post is published
Copy the overview of the three main features or improvements from the beginning of the release blog post. Post this overview on the relevant social channels (HackerNews will be the main one to post it to). You can use the 11.8 summary post as an example.

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.

#movingtogitlab

During news cycles such as the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub, there may be an increase in new GitLab users. The movingtogitlab specific Twitter account highlights all the users who tweeted about swtiching to GitLab.

Advocates should always look for new users moving to GitLab and make sure to thank them and ask what the benefits of using our products are. When doing so, please follow the #movingtogitlab workflow.

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 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.

Expertises

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

Swag, Supporting Community Individuals - Đorđe
Initiatives, Maintainer of OSS project - Borivoje
Zendesk integrations - Emily