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Evangelist Program

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  2. Handbook
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  4. Community Relations
  5. Evangelist Program

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Overview

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.

How to see what we're working on

We use the Evangelist Program label 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 Q2 OKR Epic and 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.

Q2 OKR: GitLab Heroes

We are creating the GitLab Heroes program to help us to better engage, support, and thank members of the wider GitLab community who serve as advocates of GitLab in tech communities around the globe. You can track our progress, comment, and contribute via the GitLab Heroes Epic and related issues.

Evangelist Program KPIs

We are actively looking at ways to improve the data collection for our Meetup activity. If you have ideas for how we can improve, please reach out to evangelists@gitlab.com.

GitLab presentations given at meetups KPI Definition

A GitLab-related presentation is defined as 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 where GitLab is only a sponsor and does not have a speaking slot. The goal for Q2 is 20 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.

Participants at Meetups with GitLab presentation KPI Definition

This KPI tracks the number of attendees at meetups where a GitLab-related presentation is delivered, as defined above. Because of the difficulties mentioned above, it can be hard to identify all meetups with GitLab presentations. A proxy metric here can be to estimate attendance from RSVPs on Meetup.com. The Evangelist Program Manager estimates that mettup attendance ranges between 35 and 50% of RSVPs.

Upcoming events

The Community Events calendar includes a list of our upcoming meetups, hackathons, office hours, and other community events.

Meetups

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.

Organize a meetup

Speak at a meetup

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:

Other meetups

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

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.

Adding yourself to the Heroes page

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:

Once you have the above items, follow these steps to add yourself to the Heroes page:

  1. Go to the Heroes file in the GitLab.com / www-gitlab-com project.
  2. On the file page, click on the button labeled Web IDE near the middle of the page.
  3. When prompted, click Fork to create a Fork of the repo which will allow you to make changes and submit a Merge Request.
  4. You should see the 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: 
  twitter: 
  bio: 
  gitlab: 
  picture:
  5. After updating heroes.yml, use the file browser on the left side of the screen to navigate to source/images/heroes.
  6. Click the ⋁ 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.
  7. Once you have finished this, click the 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.
  8. Check the files to ensure your updates are what you expect. If they are, click the check mark next to the filename to "stage" these changes.
  9. Once you have verified all of the edits, enter a short commit message including what you've changed. Choose 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.
  10. Click on the Activity link in the header to go to your Activity page. Once there, click on the blue Create merge request button at the top of the page.
  11. Fill out the merge request details. Please ensure you tick the box to 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.
  12. Mention @johncoghlan in a comment in the merge request so our team can review and merge.

Community events

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: event decision tree

Submit an event request to our team

To submit a community event for support or sponsorship:

  1. Review our events decision tree to ensure you are directing your event inquiry to the appropriate team.
  2. Submit an issue using the sponsorship-request template.
  3. For Service Desk or other auto-generated issues that contain sponsorship requests, we will retroactively apply the 'sponsorship-request' to the issue. The process for updating an issue with no template to the 'sponsorship-request' template is: copy text from original issue, assign 'sponsorship-request' template to issue, paste text from original issue into the appropriate field at bottom of template, update remaining fields.
  4. GitLab XDRs: for contact requests received in Salesforce via the Sales webform requesting event sponsorship, please change ownership to GitLab Evangelist in SFDC & be sure to "check the box" to send a notification.
  5. GitLab's Evangelist Program Manager will review the request and follow up with the event contact.

How we assess requests

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.

Find a tech speaker

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.

Become a tech speaker

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.

Resources for speakers

Contribute content

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:

  1. Review: review submissions for accuracy.
  2. Say thanks: contact the creators to say thank you, share a swag code, and highlight other ways they can contribute. $25/creator is the standard amount.
  3. Share: Post on social (with a credit to the author) or retweet.
  4. Syndicate: for posts that we love or that answer a common or important question, we may ask the author if we can add the post to our Medium publication or the GitLab blog.
  5. Curate: creators who have shown a depth of experience around topics important to GitLab and the wider GitLab community may be asked to submit talks or posts about said topics.

Blog

Coming soon. Contact evangelists@gitlab.com if you have any questions.

Videos

Coming soon. Contact evangelists@gitlab.com if you have any questions.

Evangelist Program Office Hours

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.

Helpful Resources

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