Given the Developer Evangelism team's familiarity with our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we regularly engage in managing situations that require GitLab to address urgent and important concerns of our community members.
Our team uses the Community response board to organize tasks.
@johncoghlan
in a relevant issue or notify the Developer Evangelism team in the #dev-evangelism-and-technical-marketing Slack channel. Please also apply the ~Community Interest
and ~Community response
labels to any relevant issues or epics related to this announcement.@dev-evangelism
User Group in a Slack message in a Slack thread or channel where the situation is being discussed or the #dev-evangelism-and-technical-marketing Slack channel.Community response
label to related issues, epics and MRs. Our team owns the label for the gitlab-com and gitlab-org groups. You can use this quick action: /label ~"dev-evangelism" ~"Community response"
to apply the labels.+ New topic
and selects Internal as category. This is a private category accessible by team members.
Coordinate blog post publishing with forum topic publishing. This has a circular dependency on each other, and needs to be done in the same minutes.
Community
and saves the edit.Hide Revisions
for each revision to avoid any confusion.cmd+shift+n
in Chrome on macOS).Tip: If the blog post URL is not ready yet, create an empty forum topic, and add the blog URL in the publishing step. Discourse requires text in the post, use **TODO: Add blog post URL and description**
.
We should strive to automate manual tasks for efficiency and to avoid unnecessary stress to individuals in the response team. In many cases, we use Zapier integrations to post mentions of GitLab in a Slack channel.
While we strive for consistency in the process of monitoring the individual community response channels, in some cases it might not be possible due to the nature of the platform (e.g. lack of an API). In cases where automation is not possible, we distribute monitoring tasks amongst that team.
This is a set of general recommendations for automating the monitoring processes on some of the channels the team will be listening to:
When there is an ongoing discussion with many threads and requiring multiple answers, proceed with bias for action to address them.
Example analysis for the file extensions not being allowed in usernames thread on HackerNews:
This bug affects the user profile page, when you call it like https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi.html it will not render the page correctly.
The attempt to fix was to disallow reserved file type extensions, but the error message was wrong.
In addition, there was speculation on security: does GitLab filtering this indicate that the protection against injection attacks is brittle?
which needed additional clarification in this comment.
With added clarity, we can involve more experts and stakeholders to join the discussion.
When the topic is explicitly about GitLab and on the Hacker News front page for hours, we need to monitor and revisit it frequently.