Developer Relations Workflows and Tools

This page outlines cloud resources and workflows used by the Developer Relations team at GitLab. It provides guidance on managing and allocating resources effectively, ensuring that team members can leverage cloud infrastructure for community apps, demo projects, and contributor success tools while maintaining best practices for both long-term production environments and short-lived individual resources.

Cloud Resources

Google Cloud Resources

The Google Cloud project group-community-a29572 is used for:

Overview

The Developer Relations team will contribute to enforce the GitLab Community Code of Conduct on GitLab.com, to ensure we keep a positive, welcoming and inclusive environment for everyone to contribute.

Currently, the team will engage in moderation if there is a discussion (generally on an issue or on a Merge Request) that requires urgent or a significant volume of moderation.

Please reach out in the #developer-relations Slack channel and tag @dev-advocates when urgent.

Common Room is a community growth platform that helps manage, engage, and grow digital communities by integrating data across different platforms, identifying members, and reporting trends and sentiment.

The Developer Relations team uses Common Room to aggregate, review, and take action on insights from across our community platforms. It is also used to track trends and community sentiment.

Accessing Common Room

Access is granted through Okta and is billed per individual seat. Currently, there are no available open seats. Additional seats can be purchased via a Zip request.

Overview

The GitLab Community Discord server is a place to connect with the wider GitLab community, join live streams and pair-coding sessions, share projects, and discuss contributions with other community members. Whether you’re new to GitLab and looking for help getting started or an experienced user looking to share your knowledge with others, the server is a place to chat with the community in real-time.

In our community server, you can:

Zapier subscription

We use Zapier to automate the task of forwarding mentions of GitLab, swag store orders, etc.

The Zapier subscription runs on the Team plan, and is shared with the GitLab team.

Zapier access

• URL: https://zapier.com
• Account: search for the shared Zapier account in 1Password’s Zapier vault. Please file an access request if you cannot access that vault.

Once logged in, you can access, edit and create Zaps in the Developer Relations folder

Team Budgets

We use Allocadia to manage team budgets. Due to a limited number of seats being allocated to the Marketing team, only a limited number has access to the tool from the Developer Relations team (sign-in from Okta is required). They are responsible for coordinating with the Developer Relations team to make sure that forecasts are properly added to Allocadia.

Quarterly Budget Planning Issues. As each quarter begins, the Developer Relations team creates a new issue using the quarterly_budget_plan issue template in the Community Ops project.

The Developer Relations team provides ongoing support to a number of stakeholders who create content including Product Marketing, Brand, and numerous Sales teams. In order to ensure the technical accuracy of content being created across GitLab, we conduct regular reviews of top-performing content across GitLab’s main public facing content channels, notably about.gitlab.com and Highspot.

Fix Fridays

Our primary mechanism for conducting content reviews is Fix Fridays. These are once-monthly days set aside for content review. Team members should plan their calendar with a defined review time, for example, the last Friday of each month. If Friday is not possible, another day and time can be considered to complete the assigned tasks by the end of the month.

Overview

Workflow

Respond to e-mails sent to our community@, education@, merch@, opensource@, startups@ addresses. Deprecated e-mail aliases: movingtogitlab@, swag@shop.gitlab.com. You might still receive occasional e-mails from those addresses. If you do, please reply from the appropriate active e-mail address from within Zendesk.

Best practices

Setting up aliases

If, for some reason you absolutely need to use your own @gitlab.com e-mail account to reply to a request otherwise tracked as a Zendesk ticket, please set up and use e-mail aliases as instructed on this video. This will make the conversation to be managed as a ticket in Zendesk, as opposed to privately on your personal inbox:

The GitLab community forum (forum.gitlab.com) is a platform for users to register, ask questions, and collaborate, embodying GitLab’s values of transparency and community contribution. It features a trust-based system, moderation workflows, and various tools for organizing discussions, such as categories and tags. The forum encourages engagement from both the wider community and GitLab team members, aiming to build a knowledge-sharing environment while maintaining a code of conduct and clear administrative processes.

Overview

The r/gitlab subreddit is a place for questions, discussion, and support on all things GitLab.

Team members staff in r/gitlab

To request user flair for the GitLab subreddit, ping @devrel-team in the #developer-relations Slack channel, and include your Reddit username. Your flair will read GitLab Staff.

Moderation

As a moderator on the GitLab subreddit, you have the ability to review spam, flagged posts or comments, and close issues. You can take actions in the moderation queue. Note that if you are a moderator who does not take mod actions occasionally, you will be marked inactive be restricted from certain moderator actions.

Overview

Stack Overflow is a place for questions, discussions, and support on all things GitLab.

General questions and tags

• Questions tagged gitlab

Stack Overflow GitLab Collective

Note: The sponsorship for Stack Overflow’s GitLab Collective concluded on September 30, 2022 and the GitLab Collective was decomissioned. All of knowledge and submissions shared by our community will be retained. Articles and answers to questions about GitLab will be decoupled from the Collective and continue to exist in the public Stack Overflow knowledge base. For more details on decommissioning, visit this Stack Overflow article.

Assets

• Google Sheet “Developer Relations Swag Coupon Codes & Delivery Tracking”.
  • The file can be found in the Shared Google Drive Contributor Success, and is titled “[GitLab] Developer Relations Swag Coupon Codes & Delivery Tracking”
• Swag Redemption portal
  • https://gitlab-contributor.brilliantmade.com/

Swag Redemption Portal

This portal shows the items you can claim, given the right coupon code. This is the link sent out to Wider Community Members.

Inventory Portal

This portal shows everything we’ve ordered and that is in stock & ready to ship. Access can be requested through an access request. Mention “MyBrightSites” as the tech stack, and ping a manager from the Developer Relations department.

Overview

Handles for social channels

• The @GitLabStatus account should only be used to give updates on the availability of GitLab.com and to follow up on users reporting that GitLab.com is unavailable or responding to a previous availability update on @GitLabStatus.
• Only the infrastructure team should be posting updates on @GitLabStatus. There is a defined process for this describing who should do this, how and what channels should be alerted.

Workflow

• Community Operations should use their best judgment and reply to tweets, in these two cases:

1. To route users to the forum if they need help with a technical issue or inquiry
2. Tweet content when asked explicitly to do so by the Social Media Team or the Communications Team

Community Operations uses Zendesk via Zapier to pull in all mentions of GitLab on Twitter. When resolving Twitter tickets in Zendesk you should:

Developer Relations Zendesk instance

The Developer Relations team uses a dedicated Zendesk instance to centralize the management of relevant community mentions, and to process Education Program, Open Source Program, and Startup Program applications and requests. This instance is separate from other Zendesk instances GitLab uses.

The majority of cases in Zendesk are routed there via Zapier automation, or a native Zendesk integration.

Each case is then converted into a Zendesk ticket and filtered into a View, ordered by category. As part of their daily workflow, the Community Operations Team, and the Education and Open Source Program Managers monitor these views and process tickets through completion.