| GitLab Team Handle | @gitlab-org/developer-relations/contributor-success |
| Slack Channel | #contributor-success & #contributor-success-confidential |
| Slack Channels from initiatives that we help drive | #leading_organizations |
| Team Boards | gitlab-org/-/boards/4296693 |
| Issue Tracker | gitlab-org/developer-relations/contributor-success/team-task |
| Workflows | Contributor Success Contributor Workflows |
| Metrics | Contributor metrics & dashboards |
| Contributing Organization Tracking | Contributing Organization Tracking |
| A Contributor's User Journey | User Journey |
| Community pairing sessions | Community pairing sessions |
This team directly follows the strategy outlined in our open source growth strategy.
The goal of the team is to increase the technical improvements and efficiency of our contribution process to sustain our ambition of 1000+ contributors with merged MRs per month to GitLab.
Note: FY24 Direction will come up shortly
In FY23 we will be focused on growing the number of unique new monthly contributors, reducing Open Community MR Age (OCMA) and increasing MRARR. This will increase development velocity without requiring additional engineering resources.
Parallel to this we'll increase observability of community contributed value through improving the business intelligence around it. This will allow us to create some predictability through foreshadowing. These efforts are cross-functional and require working together with Engineering and Product Development. This accounts for 70 - 80% of the workload. The remaining 20 - 30% is ad-hoc work. The ad-hoc work is eclectic and ranges from supporting customers on contributions, supporting various open source initiatives and supporting the Engineering Productivity team.
The GitLab Leading Organizations program is a cross-functional initiative that is led by the Contributor Success team and Developer Relations team.
The Leading Organization program supports GitLab's mission by recognizing and incentivizing organizations who are among our most active contributors. A company or individual qualifies for unique benefits by reaching 20 merged merge requests or more over a trailing three full calendar month basis.
See our workflows on how to add or remove an organization to the program.
All issues that relate to the Open Source project GitLab and that can serve to enhance the contributor flow and are public by nature should be created here by default. We aim to not have any distinction between contributors or GitLab team-members for which we expect by default that everyone should be able to contribute to.
Contributor SuccessAll issues that relate to the inner working of the company GitLab, including specific internal team workings, onboardings-issues or issues relating to customers that should be separated from the Open Source project GitLab can be placed here.
Contributor Successgitlab-org level.Every quarter, the team commits to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The below links to our current and previous quarter OKRs, it updates automatically as the quarter progresses.
Note: Due to the switch to GitLab's OKR system, we no longer have the ability to view the OKRs from FY23Q4. A hard-copy was made of the state of these OKRs as of 2023-01-30.
Contributor Success FY24 Q2 OKR Overview
We have the following Performance Indicators
More details can be found in the Unique Wider Community Contributors per Month Marketing PI section
More details can be found at the Leading Organizations MR Time-to-review Quality PI section
More details can be found in the OCMA Community-Relations PI section
Please see Contributing Orgs tracker for details how to onboard or offboard a GitLab account from being linked to a customer account, and being counted into the MRARR metric.
More details can be found at the MRARR Community-Relations PI section
More details can be found at the Community Coaches per Month Community-Relations PI section
More details can be found at the Community Contribution MRs as Features per Month Community-Relations PI section
There are several teams across various reporting structures that work on making the GitLab Community great.
The team uses the Contributor Growth board. Everything that we're working actively is present above the cut-line. Our planning is always focussed on achieving our PIs & OKRs.
5 labels are present
~contributorgrowth::velocity
~contributorgrowth::increase value
~contributorgrowth::expand outreach
~contributorgrowth::scale the community
~contributorgrowth::internal
Once a month, in the 3rd week of the month, we use the Contributor Success stand-up to review how we progressed. We define what goes above the cutline and what should go below the cutline in order to meet our OKRs & PIs for the quarter. We re-assess the importance and make sure to disseminate our learnings.
Every 2 weeks we hold an asynchronous retrospective in the #contributor-success-confidential channel using Geekbot.
Questions asked are
Contributor Success' DRI is responsible for summarizing the discussion and creating an issue in the team tracker
gitlab-org/developer-relations/contributor-success/team
so that it can be easily retrieved in the future.
Contributor Success' DRI is responsible for taking the feedback to the monthly planning meeting.
The purpose of this stand-up is to collaborate between teams members of Contributor Success. This is a team-specific meeting to check in on blockers, progress and ways to think differently & iterate towards our goals.
We are reviewing the Contributor Growth weekly, making sure our active work is aligned towards our OKRs and towards the new insights we get from our PIs.
The purpose of this stand-up is to collaborate cross-functionally between various teams and GitLab team members on initiatives for how to reach our goal of 1000 contributors per month. This is a subset of the User Engagement top initiative: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com-top-initiatives/-/epics/8
A curated list of external resources for improving open source community relations and the contributor experience:
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenace of Open Source Software
Non-code contributions are the secret to open source success
Contributor Success champions community office hours as a mechanism of engaging the wider community.
We helped arrange a series of 6 sessions in 2023, but would now like to help encourage and empower teams to organize their own. The recordings are available in the community office hours playlist on our GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel.
The sessions were organized in GitLab, in the Contributor Success issue tracker, issue #247. Here you can find links to the agendas, recordings, etc.
If you would like someone from Contributor Success to join your office hours call, please mention @gitlab-org/developer-relations/contributor-success
or drop a request in #contributor-success on Slack.
We recommend adding an event to the GitLab Team Meetings calendar (internal) and creating:
NOTE: Make sure Zoom links have the password embedded.
In the Google doc it is a good idea to link to some relevant content. Please see below example:
Zoom: Link to Zoom meeting
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/gitlab-virtual-meetups/
Discord: https://discord.gg/gitlab
- Agenda
- Team introduction
- We could link to the relevant team page in the handbook
- Questions
- We could ask ourselves a few questions we intend to answer, or let the community ask all the questions
- Live pairing and/or issue housekeeping
- We could link to the team's issues labelled with `quick win` for example
It is your meeting and you can adapt the agenda to suit your needs.
It is recommended that you livestream to GitLab Unfiltered and/or record the Zoom call to later upload to GitLab Unfiltered.
Be sure to add the video to the community office hours playlist on YouTube.