Reviving the volunteer Engagement Team

Community Engagement
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GNOME has a presence on several platforms with different audiences. It is also a complex project, built by a flurry of contributors with sometimes very different opinions. It is very difficult for a team to speak on behalf of the whole project and to adjust to the audience of the different platforms.

Fortunately, several people offered to jump in and lend a hand! As always when several humans are involved, coordination is the best way to get coherent results.

I’m starting this Discourse thread so people can contribute ideas and time.

A Working Group For What?

The team is not simply a set of people who have access to the socials credentials. The credentials will be shared with a limited amount of trusted people to ensure the project’s image safety, and to keep a coherent tone.

The group needs to define its goals. Are we just people replying to people on social media? Are we proactively pushing news from the contributors? Are we trying to recruit volunteers? Are we trying to fundraise? Are we doing tech support?

A Group Working on What?

Once we have a better idea of what we’re trying to achieve, we need to figure out who are the audiences we want to reach out to, and what kind of message we want to deliver. The message can be actual posts. But boosting others’ posts also sends a message, since it shows our support to a particular issue.

This brings us to the question of the channels we want to be active on. Where are the people we want to reach out to? What are their expectations there? How do we share messages that make sense to them? Is our presence somewhere (such as on X) sending a negative message? Do we have a way to know if we’re doing well? What do we measure, how, and how often? Who is in charge of it?

Of course, the team can’t work in isolation. While it’s difficult to be “the voice of the project”, it’s possible to amplify the contributors’ voice. So how does content make it to the channels we publish on? What is the venue for contributors to suggest content?

Finally in terms of execution, we need to have a limited set of people with credentials to the socials to be able to actually publish the content and potentially interact with people on those platforms.

What we have today

While we figure out all those questions, we already have a process in place. There is room for improvement but it at least exists. Whenever someone wants to publish or boost something on socials, an issue can be opened at Issues · Teams / Engagement / Social Media and News · GitLab and @kprogri reviews issues before posting.

How can I help

If you’re interested in joining such a working group, please share your answers to the questions above, and we can iterate from it! You can also suggest more ideas if you think there’s something missing.

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My personal take on this is:

We need to have a presence on social media to proudly showcase our work, show that we have an impact on the world, and recruit volunteers. This working group should work in coordination with the Foundation when there are fundraisers, but it shouldn’t be its primary responsibility.

To be efficient, people from the working group need to blend in with the rest of the contributing community. We need to have a general idea of what is going on in the project and ideally on the Foundation side as well.

It’s not realistic to expect a handful of volunteers to be omniscient though, so we will need to make sure the rest of the contributing community knows they can push information to the working group too!

I don’t think it’s scalable nor desirable to provide tech support for free on socials, and it encourages bullying.

I would start with “who is our audience now” and stretch it to “who else do we want to add in it”.

The linux desktop is an enthusiasts niche. My guess is that the audience is made of people who like to tinker with their computer, who like to be in control of their machines, who care about privacy and transparency.

GNOME caters to a subset of that audience. People who want to have digital dignity but who also don’t want to work for the computer. People who want the computer to get out of the way.

The general vibe I would go for is “GNOME has your back”. It doesn’t spy on you, it doesn’t leak data, it doesn’t try to lock you in, and it tries to get out of the way. It doesn’t provide too many knobs and switches because it focuses on providing sane defaults. It Just Works™.

The fediverse is a particularly good platform for such a message. I don’t think Twitter/X is a good platform for that message, and our presence there is a very bad signal. I would be in favor of deleting our tweets there, and just parking the handle.

LinkedIn gained popularity after the Twitter exodus. I am not convinced we have a compelling message to share there beyond sharing contributors and partners success stories.

I don’t have a strong opinion about Reddit. I stopped using it a while ago and it did wonders to my peace of mind, but I’m not against relaying news there and making sure it stays a relatively healthy environment, if someone else volunteers to moderate it.

I would love for GNOME to have a YouTube presence to support our message. I would be able to host, record and edit a video podcast, but I definitely don’t have enough time to write the episodes and produce the rest of the content (such as demos). We can keep a low pace presence by doing release videos.

I quite like relying on GitLab issues. It’s scalable, searchable, we can assign people to issues, we can easily keep track of the open/closed status. I think it works well. We just need to make sure that:

  1. It’s properly advertised in the handbook and in the community
  2. There is someone monitoring the repo and responding quickly

Looking forward to others’ thoughts on all of this!

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I actually wonder if this is an area we need to define more clearly project-wide. In the same way that we have a logo and color scheme, we could have a defined “voice” that we can refer back to any time someone is representing GNOME itself. We sort of have this for software on the Human Interface Guidelines, but that’s definitely distinct from an outward-facing “brand voice.”

This is not critical (I’m also fine just going with vibes…), but could be helpful. Maybe something to contribute to brand.gnome.org.

Strong agree about both the fediverse and Twitter/X. At the very least, I’d stop posting to X and put a message in the profile mentioning the Mastodon account. And we’d want to make sure we stop linking to the X account from any web properties eventually.

I like leaning on GitLab more, as we could eventually also handle some automation from that side; e.g. have a GitLab action that uses social platform APIs to post approved posts so we can avoid having to copy-paste and even hand out credentials for the most part. And we can use GitLab groups to manage access/to determine whose approval means a post gets posted. Sounds like a fun project… :grin: But we don’t need anything like that to continue using the issue tracker there as-is today.

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Thanks for starting this thread, @thibaultamartin !

A working group for what

I personally wonder if this should be a new “comms” team rather than reviving the engagement team. In the past engagement spanned a range of activities, from supporting release parties, running fundraisers, producing the foundation’s annual report, websites, etc etc. This broad scope meant that the team’s focus tended to wander, and core responsibilities sometimes got forgotten. Having a dedicated team just for comms would hopefully avoid this focus drift. It would also allow people who just want to do social media to do just that.

Voice/identity

I really like the idea of designing voice and identity guidelines. Defining a vision/mission/value prop would be good too.

How does the content make it to the channels we publish on?

Low friction is key here. I would love it if we could allow people to contribute posts using Matrix, like they can for TWIG. Failing that, GitLab issues is probably the way to go indeed. It would be good to have issue templates for people to fill in, so they know what information is needed.

If we can automate certain tasks, or queue them up, that would be great. A regularised process to plan ahead would help, for example a monthly call to see what’s coming up and prepare the posts ahead of time.

Team awareness

Another thing to figure out is how the team stays on top of what’s being posted where. If certain people are only watching certain platforms, it’s easy to miss if a channel goes quiet or drifts off-message.

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I agree with most of everything folk have said so far.

In terms of LinkedIn, I think it does make sense to keep a presence there. While the Fediverse is great, many of the world’s population don’t know it even exists, while nearly everyone involved in tech has touched LinkedIn. Let’s drop X as soon as we can, but keep LinkedIn.

This ties in with one of the goals: is the comms team aiming to communicate with existing GNOME users, and/or aiming to reach new folk who might not know what GNOME is, or free software? Who is the target audience?

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Ok, I have many ideas and I agree to a lot of things that were already said in the above replies, so I try to put everything relevant I can think of right now.

To be efficient, people from the working group need to blend in with the rest of the contributing community. We need to have a general idea of what is going on in the project and ideally on the Foundation side as well.

Yes I think so too, and I feel like this has been also a thing that could have been a bit better in the past. To me for example the GNOME Mastodon account always felt a bit distanced, separate from the projects and its community itself. Its very possible that this is not true and the people behind it are very much a center part of the project, but I perceived it like that. So I think communicating also about the comms team itself would be important, to make people aware that they can suggest posts, but also everyone knows that posts are getting suggested by the community.

In general I think the socials should also highlight and support individual GNOME contributors and their efforts/achievements, to motivate them but also others for similar contributions.

About the different social media platforms, I think we should reach audiences on as many as possible and be careful about not using one (like X, which should be not used anymore). People in different parts of the world, with different backgrounds use other social media platforms than “us” for many reasons, I don’t think we should exclude them.

I would start with “who is our audience now” and stretch it to “who else do we want to add in it”.

I really like the idea of designing voice and identity guidelines. Defining a vision/mission/value prop would be good too.

I think this is really important too. Also for the foundation and fundraising (by the foundation but also others). But also I would like to keep in mind that the foundation is just using this, and GNOME the project, the contributors, the community designs it.

is the comms team aiming to communicate with existing GNOME users, and/or aiming to reach new folk who might not know what GNOME is, or free software?

I believe we should definitely try to reach out to new user audiences! So far this didnt really happen I think, also because there wasnt really a identity for GNOME or strategy with for example vision/mission/values to make GNOME interesting for non-tech people. So I think this is very much needed.

I don’t think it’s scalable nor desirable to provide tech support for free on socials

I agree, this can be done by the community instead.

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Thanks all for the great feedback!

Very good point. The narrower the scope, the more chances we have to keep it going. Let’s start small, it will always be possible to expand later. “Comms Team” work for me, not strong feelings on the naming.

I don’t think Matrix is the best way to handle it here. The team needs to be able to look up if we have shared a post, assign someone to the task of posting it, potentially even define more complex workflows like “Write → Approve → Post → Close”. Gitlab is not the perfect tool, but probably better for this specific job.

I’m all in for regular “deadlines” to keep momentum, but my personal preference is to keep things as asynchronous as possible. Having a sort of chair for the team in charge of setting monthly priorities is probably a first good step?

That’s a good point. Some tools like Buffer allow this, but they can be quite pricey even for nonprofits. I don’t think it’s worth investing in such a tool for now, and I’m not aware of any OSS alternative.

I’m aligned with this. I’m not sure what kind of message we can offer that resonates with the audience there, but we should keep a presence somehow.

Definitely. We need to get the team in a working state first (make sure the repo is monitored by several people, make sure enough people can post once a topic has been brought to the team) and then we can make more noise about it.

Off the top of my head, after making sure we’re operational we need to update the handbook, do an announcement in TWIG and maybe even the hackers room.

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My personal experience at work:

  • GitLab works fine for tracking comms: blog posts, social media, events, etc.
  • a simple workflow, with a well defined checklist, makes contributions easier

At Igalia, we use a GitLab project, issue boards, templates, and labels:

  1. create a Teams/Comms group
  2. use issue templates for different tasks:
  • blog posts
  • social media posts
  • events
  1. use issue boards to keep track of the open issues and their status

As an example, this is how I track blog posts:

  1. the author of a blog post opens an issue with an idea for a blog pos
  2. I assign the “blog: proposal” label
  3. gather feedback and comments
  4. once the blog post is being written, the label is changed to “blog: editing draft”
  5. during draft review, the label is moved to “blog: reviewing draft”
  6. the process goes back and forth between review and editing
  7. once the review is complete, the blog is published, the issue is closed, and the label is changed to “blog: post published”

This allows me to keep track of the blog posts in flight, the ones that have been published, and have numbers at the end of the year.

For events, we use a similar approach: every conference gets an issue, with a list of attendees. Social media posts related to talks/presentations/attendance are drafted as comments and published on a schedule.

On top of this, everyone involved in comms is in the same shared Matrix room, so people can keep track, offer help, and in general be involved.

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Reddit is quite good for engagement. As a mod, we have 94k subscribers. It’s good to place to look at demographics of your audience. The sub is a mix of various types of people.

Largely toxicity is at a low because there are enough commenters who understand GNOME’s design philosophy to engage that moderation is pretty sane vs say back in 2013 or 2014 where it was pretty grim.

Plus, BrageFuglseth has done an amazing job since becoming a mod with a furious amount of content and engagement.

Twitter/X. We need to start winding it down there. I’m of the opinion that we are supporting a nazi site and it’s against our values.

Regarding a comms team - you don’t really have an infrastructure to do this. A comms team needs to be plugged into GNOME development. Before a comms team, you need to create an information pipeline. So in Gitlab, you need to at least highlight something you want the comms team to talk about - most contributors are already overworked and asking them to also think about what to highlight is a difficult task IMHO.

I was once on a marketing team at Intel, and my job was to highlight our successes in open source using infographics and the like. We could do all kinds of interesting comms that generate response based on metrics. Quick little infographics that highlights how the project is doing and what it is investing in that kind of thing. That avoids trying to overly talk with maintainers trying to get something to talk about or depending on them to tell you something.

I’ve been in the engagement team from the beginning, so I’ve seen all the permutations and I also understand how our resources work. You aren’t going to get good comms without investment from the technical contributors and we need to solve that first.

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Maybe a simpler version is to use wordpress plugin as your editing / review cycle and then publish on wordpress that also publishes it to mastodon? This way, people who may not be familiar with software engineering tools could also participate.

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Maybe a simpler version is to use wordpress plugin as your editing / review cycle and then publish on wordpress that also publishes it to mastodon? This way, people who may not be familiar with software engineering tools could also participate.

That is also a common approach, I feel that GitLab Issues should be more than enough, IMO. I see many open-source projects that use social automation via Issues on repositories.

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I vaguely remember discussing this solution like 5 years ago or something before we had GNOME staff.

I’m ok with whatever is sustainable, low barrier of entry, and easy to use.

Someone should write a social media app mayhap? :smiley:

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I’ve been wondering recently whether we should start posting on Bluesky or not. It is far from being a perfect platform and their recent round of funding make me raise an interrogative eyebrow, but it also seems to be one of the platforms people choose when fleeing Twitter.

While I think it’s important to stop posting on Twitter, I also think it’s important to meet people where they are to avoid only preaching to the choir.

I’d be happy to create the BlueSky credentials, store them in vaultwarden once it’s deployed by @bpiotrowski, and check with Bart or Andrea how to set the TXT record to get a @gnome.org handle.

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Some clarification on this would be nice.

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Here is the announcement by bluesky. Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users - Bluesky . They promise not to enshit the service, but at some point VC wants to cash in so we have to see. Also if I remember correctly, some entities involved also gave Musk money to buy Twitter, but I cannot find the reference for that anymore.

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6 posts were split to a new topic: Software is political

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I think we do want to invest simply because that is where the people are moving to. We can’t really trust any of these establishments in the long term because eventually investors as you say @jensgeorg are going to want results from their investments and that cynically means violating some kind of privacy principle.

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It’s possible to link an existing Mastodon account to Bluesky – a few articles online show how to do it including this one. So it might be quite easy to get a GNOME presence there :slight_smile:

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