To support, grow, and engage the GitLab Education community through collaboration, content, and conversations.
Education evangelism is a specialty of developer relations aimed at evangelizing DevOps and GitLab at educational institutions around the globe.
Our stakeholder community includes students, faculty, staff, administrators, and learners of any origin. The GitLab Education Evangelist team seeks to increase awareness, inform, and connect with community members through a variety of mediums. We also are visible power users of GitLab and DevOps applications. We strive to be a resource for all learners and, in accordance with GitLab's Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Values, we seek to increase outreach to under-represented and under-estimated people in the education community.
For this reason, we choose to have a team with credibility from real-world educational and technical experience. Additionally, we enable others to tell their authentic stories - engineers, open source community members, and GitLab's diverse set of customers. For those reasons, we chose the title of Evangelist as defined as "an enthusiastic advocate."
Social media Content creation Presentations and events Student Spotlight Program
The GitLab educational evangelists are technical evangelists with a background in or enthusiasm for education and students of all levels. Educational evangelists connect, engage, and create technical content for our education community.
There are specific goals for the team:
The GitLab for Education team builds thought leadership, connects with our community, and increases our reach on social media. See the Education Evangelism on Social Media handbook page to learn more about our social media strategy.
Bambu is an app used to create suggested posts so other team members can use their own social media accounts to tweet relevant and useful articles, media, and other information to their own networks. The Education Evangelist should take the training available (Note: you must be logged into your GitLab unfiltered youtube account to view) to become a curator in order to be able to provide content to spread awareness of the Education program. Once you've finished the training, tag the Social Media specialist in an issue and request access. From there, follow the instructions in the handbook. Finally, add yourself to the table of known curators on the curator page.
Types of content that work well for Bambu include:
Bambu is not for announcements, workshop sign ups, or to start new initiatives. It's more of a place to show off what's already happened with the team.
We build out content to help educate developers around best practices related to Education, GitLab, and DevOps. Content includes presentations, demos, course materials, best practices, workshops, livestreams, blog posts, and social media engagements.
Content is especially valuable when connected between mediums. Consider making a video version of a blog, or livestreaming the creation of a code demo or lesson plan.
Livestreaming guidelines can be found on our Twitch handbook page
Content will either be published on the GitLab Blog, where all our blogposts include the education-program postType in their front matter for proper tracking.
If the blog post is not featured on the GitLab blog, posts will publish on the GitLab groupDev.to
Recordings from past workshops and other team activities can be found on the GitLab Unfiltered channel on YouTube.
Participation in events such as conferences and conventions are an important part of Evangelism. In the case of Education Evangelism, both tech and education events are important to take part in. An Education Evangelist seeks out relevant organizations and events to participate in as part of their role. As events and organizations to consider are found we will add them to an issue in the Outreach project.
When preparing for presentations and talks, post your slides to the Developer Evangelism or Developer Relations slack channel for feedback on slides. This ensures that the most current messaging is being used. It's also good for a sanity check and quick edit on the content. Another good way to review for a speaking engagement is to post a zoom room to the speaking channel and ask for people to join a practice session.
Education Evangelists should consider being a part of the Speakers Bureau.
An overview of how to handle events where the Education team has a booth, see this handbook page
We directly contribute to the wider community by speaking at education and tech conferences. If you've come across a conference you feel is valuable to the Education Team, please open an issue in the Outreach project and use the edu-conference label to suggest a conference for attendance.
Some events will include visiting a campus directly and providing a lecture or workshop for educators or students. We have a variety of workshops and lectures, some of which are listed in the DevOps Education Guide Project. These are organized by the Education Evangelist directly with a student group or professor or other relevant campus representative. Make sure you create an issue in the outreach project with details of the time, location, and tentative plans. Update this as you communicate with the relevant campus representative. Tag the GitLab Community Programs manager or your direct manager in the issue to receive written approval for the event. Swag should be coordinated with Boundless and shipping coordinated with the relevant campus representative. Providing food for an event outside of normal class hours is not expected, but is highly encouraged. The food budget is part of the swag budget for the quarter.
An Education Evangelist will likely only do campus visits in the 1st and 3rd quarters since these most overlap with university semesters. Every effort should be made to have several events in one visit, either with one school or with surrounding schools in order to justify the cost of an overnight trip (airfare, lodging, food, etc.). Discuss plans with a manager before agreeing to or offering an in-person visit in order to ensure you are only offering what can be done. Since in-person events are more intensive and require more planning, an Education Evangelist should consider doing only 1-2 campus visits a quarter in addition to other events (Education Specific conferences, community events, etc.). We can always schedule a virtual lecture or workshop instead of in person.
GitLab for Education offers a DevOps 101 lecture, aka "Intro to DevOps: Software Development in Practice" for professors looking to introduce or strengthen DevOps concepts for their students. There is a Google form for signing up for this type of lecture. When a new repsonse is recorded, or after an event where we solicitied sign ups, the Education Evangelist will send emails using this approved copy to begin planning virtual lectures with the interested parties.
All of our work is stored as issues in the Education Program Group. Issues are stored in projects. A list of projects and descriptions can be found here.
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
edu-twitch |
This is for issues related to Twitch streams |
edu-evangelism |
This is a general label for Education Evangelist related issues |
edu-conference |
Label used for conference activity planning |
edu-student-community-initiative |
Issues related to building community directly with students |
student-contributor |
for student contributions to GitLab |
The GitLab for Education Team tracks our impressions on the Education Program Impression Dashboard. All outreach should be entered into the Education Asset Inventory Google Sheet in order to appear in the dashboard. Directions for entering each publication are in the Read Me tab of the spreadsheet.
We track impressions for all content created (videos, blog posts, articles, etc). Generally, we measure the total number of impressions after the content has been published for 30 days. In order to stay on track with recording impressions, each team member should create a monthly recurring Impressions calendar task on the first day of the month. Each time a piece of content is published, a link should be added to the calendar task. On the first day of the new month, each team member should check impressions for the content and enter the metrics for those items into the Education Asset Inventory Google Sheet. If it hasn't been 30-days since the content was live, wait to enter the metrics until the next invite.
| Asset Type | Metric | Impressions Dashboard | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitLab Blog | Views | Yes | Blog posts listed in the asset inventory sheet and blog post with education-program Post_Type |
| Blog on External Site | Actual Views | Yes | Record after 30 days |
| Case Study | Views | Yes | |
| YouTube Video GitLab Unfiltered | Views | Yes | |
| YouTube Video GitLab Filtered | Views | Yes | |
| GitLab Landing Page | Views | Yes | |
| Media Articles Impressions | UMV* | Yes | UMVs are separated from actual impressions since they represent potential impressions. |
| Downloadable Asset | Views | Yes | |
| YouTube (non-GitLab) | Views | Yes | |
| Twitch (WIP) | Unique Viewers | Yes | We don't currently have a Twitch Asset Type but will add one. |
| Twitter Impressions | No | Twitter impressions are not currently connected to our dashboard. See notes below. | |
| Views on Posts, Articles, Documents | No | LinkedIn views are not current connected to our dashboard. See notes below. |
*UMV is Unique Monthly Visitors and is reported by the media agency.
We collect Twitter impressions and LinkedIn views as part of our impressions metrics. Social Media impressions originating from Education team member's account are entered in the Social Media Impressions tab of the Education Asset Inventory Google Sheet. This sheet currently serves as our record while we working on adding a social media widget to the dashboard itself.
Social media impressions originating from the official GitLab account at the request of the Education team may be reported at the discretion and availability of the Social Marketing team. If you wish to record impressions from an official post, request metrics on the social coverage issue 30 days after the post goes live.
Impressions are recorded at the end of each month and entered into the sheet:
Twitter: Each team member records the total number of Twitter Impressions (original content and retweets) from the Analytics Dashboard on Twitter for each month. If GitLab official tweets are reported upon, include these as well.
LinkedIn: Each team member records the total number of views of posts, articles, and documents for each month. If GitLab official posts are reported upon, include these as well.
GitLab team members can also reach us at any time on the #education-evangelism Slack channel where we share updates, ideas, and thoughts with each other and the wider team.
When we are reviewing opportunities or requests for support, we must be able to answer yes to each of these questions to move forward with the work:
If the answer to any of the above questions is "no", our team will collaborate with each other and the requestor to do one of the following actions:
