#community-advocates chat channel for questions that don't seem appropriate to use the issue tracker for.#incident-management, #infrastructure-loungeThe 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.
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.
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 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 | ✖ |
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).
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,
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.
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 publishedCommunity Advocates support the Education, Open Source and Startups Programs, and their Program Managers.
Their role is to process and manage program applications as per the application management workflow.
Learn more about recognizing contributors
Community Advocates manage merchandise requests, inventory and the merchandise tech stack.
Learn more about how Community Advocates manage merchandise
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 switching 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.
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 team's processes. These are called expertises.
From time to time we run expertise rotation rounds to ensure all Advocates are trained in all expertises.
Zendesk is the central place for Community Advocates to track wider community mentions across our response channels and to effectively respond to them. It also used to measure our KPIs.
Learn more about how we use Zendesk
Zapier is an automation tool used to identify mentions across our response channels and to route them into Zendesk as tickets
Discourse is the platform on which the GitLab forum is run.
Learn more about how we use Discourse.
Disqus is the commenting platform we use to enable our wider community to comment on the GitLab website, the DevOps Tools pages, and documentation comments.
Salesforce is the CRM platform we use to support the Education, Open Source and Startup Programs.
Tweetdeck is used in special cases to post and manage Twitter responses. Otherwise, Twitter responses are tracked and most generally posted directly from Zendesk.
Learn more about how we use Tweetdeck.
Shopify is the GitLab store frontend platform. Community Advocates use it to publish merchandise items for sale, for reports and inventory tracking.
Learn more about how Community Advocates manage merchandise.
Printfection is the swag management platform. Community Advocates use it to manage the inventory and orders for most swag items.
Learn more about how Community Advocates manage merchandise.
Stickermule is the swag platform used to print and order custom stickers.
Learn more about how Community Advocates manage merchandise.
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.
Each month the marketing team hosts a Key Monthly Marketing Metics meeting. The advocates team is responsible for updating relevant data in the presentation slides.
