Developer Advocacy

Overview of the Community Newsletter

We run a monthly Community Newsletter to share developer-focused content, keep community members informed about upcoming events, and promote contributions within the community. The target audience for this newsletter is aspiring and existing GitLab contributors in our community. This newsletter will not be used to drive or generate leads.

Process

The Community Newsletter is scheduled to send on last Thursday of each month at 10 AM PT / 6 PM UTC.

CFP Resources

Event call for paper submission forms differ: Some require 1000 character abstracts, others prefer shorter biographies, or require you to fill in the talk learning goals. The Developer Advocacy team uses Google docs for maintaining CFP abstracts, @dnsmichi also uses a doc for the biography and headshot URLs as SSoT.

• CFP template Google doc.
• Biography template Google doc

How we manage CFPs (Call for Proposals)

Our events list

Every year, developer advocacy prioritizes key events in our ecosystem for which we run the conference proposal (CFP) process. The event engagement with lightning talks, CFP submissions, etc. is organized in issues which are linked and summarized in a yearly strategy epic. You can also find a calendar view of our events below:

How to engage developer advocates in community response

Given the developer advocacy 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.

Notification

• Upcoming announcement: To notify the developer advocacy team of an upcoming announcement, product change, or other news event that may elicit a response from our community, the DRI should comment to @johncoghlan in a relevant issue or notify the developer advocacy team in the #dev-advocacy-team Slack channel. Please also apply the ~Community Interest and ~Community response labels to any relevant issues or epics related to this announcement.
• In-progress situation: To notify the developer advocacy team of an urgent situation that is in-progress, please tag the @dev-advocates User Group in a Slack message in a Slack thread or channel where the situation is being discussed or the #dev-advocacy-team Slack channel.
• Please give the developer advocacy team as much notice as possible so we can help influence the messaging of the announcement, prepare responses for the community, and schedule coverage. See Scheduling below for more details.
• Please add the 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.

Preparation

• In alignment with GitLab’s efficiency value, the developer advocates will work with the Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) for the community response situation to help the DRI and other experts directly address the community feedback and questions.
• When possible, the developer advocacy team will typically collaborate with the DRIs on a list of expected questions/concerns from the community and draft responses. When available, we also include materials prepared for media responses, customer responses, or other materials related to the situation in our response preparation.
• For high-priority announcements and news, we will conduct a practice exercise alongside the DRIs to test our preparation.
• In many cases, we will want to direct the community to share their feedback in the GitLab Forum. By preparing a post that we can link to from a blog post, announcement, or community response will streamline how we gather feedback and manage responses. This post should be created by a Forum admin in advance as a private post which is published at the time of the announcement.
  • Note: when a forum post is used for feedback, consider turning off comments on the blog to encourage discussion on the forum.

Community Response plan

• When possible, please create an issue using the Community Response Plan template and add details to each section per the instructions in the template.
• This issue can be shared with stakeholders to gather more information from them and get sign off, as needed.

Forum Topic Preparation

• Define a forum DRI from the administrators and moderators listed in the forum about page.
• As response requestor, provide these details:
  • Forum topic title. Can be the blog post title, or a neutral placeholder when urgent. The Discourse forum renders the topic as URL slug automatically.
  • Final blog post URL. Does not need to exist yet.
• The forum DRI navigates to + New topic and selects Internal as category. This is a private category accessible by team members.
  • Set the topic title and link the blog post URL which will later render a preview.
  • Create the forum topic, and send the URL to the response requestor.
  • Share the URL to the Forum Community Response Workflow handbook, providing instructions how to review and edit the topic on the forum.

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.

Introduction

Developer Advocacy builds out their thought leadership through social media and community engagement. The tips and strategies shared here can be used by team members and the wider community to help build their own profile as an evangelist and advocate for GitLab.

Topics:

• Education and Learning: Tips from own experience. Workshops, slides, blog posts, videos, etc.
• Events live posts. Amplify talks with screenshots, pictures and messages.
• Release Evangelism: Share feature insights with personal views.
• Community and customer best practices and GitLab insights.
• Contributions to GitLab, encouraging customers to co-create with GitLab.

UTM Tracking

Developer Advocates at GitLab are encouraged to add UTMs for URL tagging and tracking to provide analytics and insights on how well content shares are performing. This method helps to verify KPI metrics.

Team Calendar

The Developer Advocacy Team calendar contains team member speaking engagements, important conferences, CFP timelines, and other important dates.

Developer Advocates should add new speaking engagements to this calendar as they are scheduled. The Developer Advocate Program Manager will manage team-wide events such as industry conferences and their CFP timelines. If you need write access to this calendar, please contact a member of the Developer Relations team via Slack.

Introduction

This handbook page documents best practices how Developer Advocates can help wider community members with mentoring and coaching.

Mentoring

Finding a mentor

GitLab Developer Advocates actively engage with mentoring wider community members. The team’s time is limited with our many activities, please understand when we decline a request. Polywork and other platforms can help finding mentors.

Resources

• Review the process and tips in Mentoring at GitLab
• How to be a mentor: 4 ways to change someone’s life

Topics

If the career path is to becoming a Developer Advocate, the Developer Advocacy handbook provides many resources.

Team Workflow

Welcome to the Developer Advocate team workflow page. Learn how the team works and how to work with the team. We primarily use the Developer Advocate Meta issue tracker. We own the team label developer-advocacy and all of our other labels which are located at the gitlab-com group level. You can add the labels as necessary to any issue under this group for our team to track.

Overview Video

The Workflow overview video showcases the different components of the workflow in detail. The video is internal only due to confidential issues shown in workflows. If you would like to jump to the specific chapters of the video, see the links below.

Overview

Hacker News is an important social channel. Threads that mention GitLab’s structure, values, product vision, or other sensitive blog posts, articles, etc. should be treated as important, while posts about GitLab that land on the front page of Hacker News should be treated as both important and urgent.

Hacker News posts are important because they can generate traffic for our website, backlinks to our content, and, most importantly, value feedback on our product and processes. As an example, a Hacker News post about this page from January 2022 generated valuable feedback for our team.

What is advocacy?

Advocacy creates a human connection with buyers and consumers to technology way beyond typical content marketing, with a face and a name relaying the story, expressing an opinion, and ultimately influencing a decision.

Many people believe Guy Kawasaki, the former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, to be the father of advocacy.

Sources:

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/08/28/why-every-tech-company-needs-a-chief-evangelist/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing

Who can be an advocate?

Everybody in the wider GitLab Community can be an advocate. Whether you work in marketing ops or infrastructure engineering, you have a point of view on the work you do and the ecosystem of open source enterprise technology.

Contributions to OSS

The Developer Advocacy team believes in Open Source and wants to lead by example, contributing to GitLab and the OSS ecosystem. Our workshops, community activities and projects are documented in the projects overview.

Projects maintained by Developer Advocates

We organize our projects in the Developer Advocacy group. A few examples are:

• Docker Hub Limit Monitoring
  • Exporter for Prometheus
  • Monitoring Plugin
• CI/CD API Lint Git Hook
• Go Excusegen

Contribution Examples

GitLab

• GitLab CI/CD Pipeline Efficiency documentation sourcing from the CI Monitoring webcast
• CI/CD Templates: Support the default branch, shift to main

Prometheus

• GitLab CI Pipeline Exporter
  • Help with API requests
  • Michael’s contributions

HashiCorp Waypoint

• Documentation
  • GitLab CI/CD integration PR
• Blog posts
  • How to use HashiCorp Waypoint to deploy with GitLab CI/CD
• GitLab Integration
  • Waypoint Images
  • CI/CD templates
• Demo
  • Waypoint AWS ECS example
• Community
  • 5. everyonecancontribute cafe

Definition of Contributions

Contributions are “more than just code” and are often times hard to measure. Our team tries to start with a small subset and update this section over time.

Introduction

We maintain our projects in the public gitlab-da group. This group has access to an Ultimate subscription.

The group organizes use cases, workshops, tutorials, maintained open source projects, demo playgrounds, thought leadership research, and more learning resources.

Organisation Structure

All projects are organized in sub-groups on the top level. No projects are allowed on the top-level namespace gitlab.com/gitlab-da.

Use cases overview: