At GitLab our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute. In order to fulfill this mission, we need to create both the tools and platform to enable this change and a community of contributors who share our mission. We are just getting started in building the GitLab community and we encourage everyone to contribute to its growth.
There are many ways to participate in the GitLab community today: contributing to an open source project, contributing to our documentation, hosting your open source project on GitLab, or teaching your colleagues and collaborators about the value of Concurrent DevOps.
We are building an evangelist program to support people who share our mission and want to give tech talks, run local meetups, or create videos or blogs. We will be announcing more in Q1. For now, please email evangelists@gitlab.com if you have feedback on our vision, ideas for how we can build our community, or suggestions for a name for our evangelist program.
We use the Evangelist Program, Heroes, and Meetups labels to track issues. The Evangelist Program issue board provides an overview of these issues and their status.
Evangelist Program issues typically exist in the Evangelist Program subgroup but they can also exist in Field Marketing, Corporate Marketing, or other marketing subgroups. Issues related to our OKRs are listed in the Q4 OKR Epics: Grow Heroes Program and Grow Heroes Activity. Our upcoming Meetups are tagged with the Meetups label and listed on the Meetups board.
We plan to replicate this process of having a epic for future OKRs and using labels and boards to track ongoing work related to our KPIs (for example: Meetups). As our OKRs and KPIs change, this page will be updated so you can see what we are working on and track our progress.
We are actively looking at ways to improve the data collection for our Evangelist Programs. If you have ideas for how we can improve, please reach out to evangelists@gitlab.com.
Grow Heroes program, with a Q4 focus in North America. Establish Heroes governing council, 5 new meetup groups in NORAM, 10 new Heroes from NORAM.
Showcase activity generated by GitLab Heroes. 10 GitLab use-case videos or blogs published, 5 GitLab talks given by Heroes.
A GitLab Meetup is defined as a meetup with a presentation given by a GitLab-employee or a member of the GitLab community about GitLab or a tangential topic. It does not include meetups without GitLab content where GitLab only provides support. The goal for Q4 is 40 meetups in this fiscal quarter. This is currently tracked by counting the closed issues on the Meetup Board, which are issues with the "Meetup" label. This method of tracking is imperfect for many reasons. Some issues are created in other projects. There are GitLab-related presentations delivered at meetups that we do not discover until after the fact, if at all.
The Community Events calendar includes a list of our upcoming meetups, hackathons, office hours, and other community events.
GitLab supports team members and members of the wider GitLab community who want to organize or speak at meetups. Our goal in supporting these events to better engage with and increase connections among the GitLab community, increase awareness of GitLab, and better educate the technology community.
evangelists@gitlab.com. You can find the list of GitLab meetups on the meetup.com page.Approve bill button in the mail.Class does not include the appropriate finance tag (for example: Q4_FY2020_Meetups) or there are other issues with the bill, the Evangelist Program Manager should click Send back to AP.Dispute bill.For GitLab Team Members using Expensify for meetup-related expenses:
Q4_FY2020_Meetups) should be selected as a Classification when creating the expense.Meetups help us raise awarness of GitLab and build communities in new places. We love to track them to know where the community is growing. If you are speaking at a meetup as a representative of GitLab or you are giving a talk about GitLab, please let us know! Here's how and why we do this:
We use Zapier to scan Meetup.com and Twitter for GitLab events that occur outside the scope of our program. Events containing "GitLab" on Meetup.com or tweets containing "GitLab Meetup" are added to the GitLab Meetups sheet and shared in Slack in the #gitlab-meetups-feed channel. We review these events each week and reach out to thank organizers and speakers who are raising awareness for GitLab. In many cases, these organizers and speakers will also be offered support with future GitLab-related events.
GitLab Heroes engages, supports, and recognizes members of the wider GitLab community who make outstanding contributions to GitLab and our community around the globe. Examples of activities that may make a member of the wider GitLab community eligible for the Heroes program include:
Heroes are eligible for rewards to help enable and encourage contributions. These rewards include:
We have three levels of Heroes: Contributor, Hero, Superhero. A community member's contributions will determine at which level they enter the program and the benefits for Heroes increase as they progress through the levels. More detail can be found in the Heroe's Journey section of the Heroes page.
Community members who are interested in applying for the Heroes program should apply through the application form on the Heroes page.
The Heroes program is managed by the Evangelist Program Manager with support from the GitLab's Technical Evangelism team. The Evangelist Program Manager leads the review of applications along with the Technical Evangelism team. The Evangelist Program Manager also serves as the main point of contact with the Heroes community, manages Heroes related marketing pages and events, and is responsible for the adminstration of the program including metrics and KPI tracking.
Select Heroes may be asked to join the GitLab Technical Evangelism Community (TEC). At that point, those community members will be supported by and engage with the Technical Evangelism team.
Please email us at evangelists@gitlab.com if you have questions about the GitLab Heroes program.
To apply for GitLab Heroes, please complete the application form on the GitLab Heroes page. The review committee consists of the Evangelist Program Manager as the lead with the Code Contributor Program Manager and the Senior Manager, Technical Evangelism as reviewers. The composition of the review committtee is subject to change. Any changes will be reflected here.
Generally, you will receive a response from GitLab within two weeks of submitting an application. This will either be an update on the status of your application or a request for additional information. If additional information is required, you can expect an update on the status of your application within two weeks of the receipt of that info. Following the review process, the Evangelist Program Manager will inform folks who are selected to be GitLab Heroes of your status including the level (Contributor, Hero, Superhero) at which you will enter the program. If you have any questions about the status of your application, please reach out to evangelists@gitlab.com for support.
We also conduct semi-annual reviews of the current GitLab Heroes members to ensure they are remaining active in the community in order to maintain their GitLab Heroes status. When a current GitLab Hero is inactive, the Evangelist Program Manager will contact them to identify the reasons and work with them to resolve any blockers or issues. When a GitLab Hero no longer plans to remain active in the GitLab community, the Evangelist Program Manager will remove them from the active membership of the program.
Upon acceptance, Heroes are asked to submit a Merge Request to add themselves to the GitLab Heroes members page.
To add yourself to the Heroes page, you will need:
Picture Requirements
- Crop image to a perfect square.
- Keep maximum dimension under 400 by 400 pixels.
- Use the JPEG (
.jpg) or PNG (.png) format.- Test image in color and black-and-white.
- Name file
yournameinlowercaseand add the appropriate file extension.
Once you have the above items, follow these steps to add yourself to the Heroes page:
Web IDE near the middle of the page.Fork to create a Fork of the repo which will allow you to make changes and submit a Merge Request.heroes.yml file open in your browser once the fork has been created. Add the following fields to the end of the file and enter your information into each of the blank fields:
- type: person
name:
locality:
country:
role: GitLab Hero
twitter:
bio:
gitlab:
picture:
heroes.yml, use the file browser on the left side of the screen to navigate to source/images/heroes.⋁ icon next to the heroes directory, select upload file, and upload the photo of yourself. Be sure to follow the picture requirements listed above and confirm that the file name matches your picture entry in heroes.yml.Commit button in the bottom left. It should say something like 2 unstaged and 0 staged changes. This will bring up a sidebar with an Unstaged and Staged area.Create a new branch. Name the branch in the format of YOURINITIALS-heroes-page or similar. Tick the Start a new merge request checkbox. Then click Commit once more.Create merge request button at the top of the page.Allow commits from members who can merge to target branch as detailed on the Allow collaboration on merge requests across forks page in our docs.@johncoghlan in a comment in the merge request so our team can review and merge.GitLab team members can issue a Gold or Ultimate license to GitLab Heroes by following the steps below. These licenses are only open to GitLab Heroes at the Hero or Superhero level. Licenses should be issued for 6 months and can be extended as long as the GitLab Hero maintains their Hero or Superhero status in the program.
plan-change-request template.GitLab Heroes swag is available only for GitLab Heroes. In the near future, a special URL will be sent to Heroes upon acceptance to the program so that they can order swag appropriate for their level in the program. Gitlab Heroes swag production and fulfillment is managed by Nadel. The Nadel team can assist with swag replenishment, ask questions about fulfillment, and other swag-related inquiries.
The GitLab Heroes project is used for discussion via Issues, as a repo for materials that GitLab Heroes create, and a home for other resources for members of the program. Everyone in the program will have Developer access. GitLab Heroes and our community are encouraged to contribute to the project.
We'd love to support you if you are organizing or speaking at a community-driven event, be it GitLab-centric or around a topic where GitLab content is relevant (e.g. DevOps meetup, hackathon, etc.). Depending on the number and type of attendees at an event, it may be owned by Corporate Marketing, Field Marketing, or Community Relations. Our events decision tree is a guide to help you find the right team to handle an event request.
Events Decision Tree:
To submit a community event for support or sponsorship:
GitLab Evangelist in SFDC & be sure to "check the box" to send a notification.We ask the following questions when assessing an event:
Each question is graded on a scale of 0-2. We then tally the scores and assign the event to a sponsorship tier.
We ask these questions and use this scorecard to ensure that we're prioritizing GitLab's and our community's best interests when we sponsor events.
If you have questions, you can always reach us by sending an e-mail to evangelists@gitlab.com.
We'd love to support you if you are organizing an event, be it GitLab-centric or around a topic where GitLab content is relevant (e.g. DevOps meetup, hackathon, etc.).
You can get in touch with speakers from the GitLab team and the wider community to participate and do a talk at your event. We maintain a list of active speakers on our Find a GitLab speaker page. Once you find a speaker in your region, contact them directly. For GitLab team members, you can also check the #cfp channel on Slack where many of our active tech speakers will see your speaker request. Most speakers will also be able to do talks remotely if the event is virtual or if travel is a challenge.
If you have questions, you can always reach us by sending an e-mail to evangelists@gitlab.com.
If you are aware of people from the GitLab community who are interested in giving a tech talk relating to GitLab, please direct them to our Become a Speaker page for more information on the type of support we provide.
For GitLab team members who want to become a tech speaker, contact evangelists@gitlab.com and check out the #cfp channel on Slack to discover upcoming opportunities. Additional detail on the logistics of giving a talk once your proposal has been accepted can be found on the Corporate Marketing page.
GitLab actively supports content contributors. Our community team tracks GitLab content and our evangelist program manager and editorial team regularly reviews the content. If you would like to submit your content for review, please create an issue on our evangelist program project.
We make an effort to amplify and support content contributions that generate value for our community. Criteria we consider include: how well a post addresses an issue in the Community Writers issue tracker, how well a post aligns with our strategy and values, and how well a post is written.
As we identify posts that meet our criteria, we decide how we want to support the posts. We may also identify creators who we want to partner with on content. Writers who are looking for inspiration may want to visit our Community Writers issue tracker which tracks blog post ideas submitted by our community.
You can add content you find and track the status of submissions on the Quarterly Community Content issues (Q2 Issue). Submissions go through the following steps:
Coming soon. Contact evangelists@gitlab.com if you have any questions.
Coming soon. Contact evangelists@gitlab.com if you have any questions.
Our Evangelist Program Manager hosts office hours via Zoom every Friday at 10:30am ET excluding holidays. They want to answer your meetup, events, and public speaking questions and hear your feedback on our programs! You can see the meeting information and join the call via the Community Events calendar.
