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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
