Engagement BoF at GUADEC

A group of us met at GUADEC 2017 to come up with important projects for the Engagement Team for the upcoming 2017 - 2918 period. Below are a more cleaned-up version of the notes taken during that BoF. There are five main projects identified, with many initiatives within those projects to work on.

If you did not attend the GUADEC 2017 BoF and would like to get involved with some of the projects on this page, join one of our Engagement meetings, or email Nuritzi at nuritzi [at] gnome [dot] org.

Original notes were taken via etherpad: https://etherpad.gnome.org/p/engagement_BoF_GUADEC_2017

Date & Location July 31 and Aug 1, 2017 in Manchester, UK

Attendees

• Nuritzi
• Zana
• Max
• Ines Chen
• Mario W
• Michael Hall
• Alexandre
• Adelia
• Cassandra
• Andreas
• Sri
• Ken
• Sebastian
• Chris
• Chris M

UBUNTU RELEASE

During the AGM, people emphasized the need to make sure that we are poised to handle the Ubuntu migration to ship GNOME as default. We want to make sure that we help users acclimate and also help onboard new contributors to the best of our ability. The Engagement team can help with communication and to proactively help users and contributors find a new home within GNOME.

Timeline

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseSchedule

• Sept. 21, 2017 doc string freeze for ubuntu
• Users will start to come onboard on October 19, 2017 (Last Thursday of October) (April for LTS)
• July 2018 is when they auto-update
• Late August/September 2018 should be all finished

GNOME To-Do's

• We need to prepare a website update by October 6, 2017 so that it's ready to launch on the 19th.

• ACTION: See if Tom can help do the design and website implementation

  • Have something on the homepage that says "Welcome Ubuntu users" and then has a link to a wiki page with information for users and contributors

Migration guide for Ubuntu users

Here are some ideas for what to add to a migration guide:

• Why is everything different after I upgraded?!?!?!
• You did this in Unity, now you do this in GNOME

The migration guide should live on the GNOME wiki so that many people can edit it.

Ubuntu To-Do's

• When users start using GNOME, have content/videos in YELP
• Check with translators/docs team about translating content

Working Group

• Michael Hall

• Ken VanDine

• Tom Tryf
• Alexandre Franke

WEBSITE

Messaging

• The website has the wrong focus on the home page. It should be more community oriented. People want to join a community.
• Not enough pictures of people and events that we organize. These are important to help people get hooked and want to join.
• Make sure that applications are also part of the product focus
• Showcasing how to make a donation and updating the support-gnome page

• We have a bunch of things like YouTube channels that we don't showcase

• Make sure people know how to access funds for travel and how to host hackfest and ebets

• Action Items

  • Create website personas: Andreas, Nuritzi, Michael, Sri

Measurement

• How do we know if what we did was successful?

• A lot of our website traffic is from Windows. Can we convert them to users? We have (https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/) but it needs updating

• Action Items

  • What are the Windows users doing?

Language / Location Support

• e.g. other websites are gnomefr.org and gnome.gr and es.gnome.org

• Allow users to quickly find local groups (currently: https://wiki.gnome.org/UserGroups ) and local events

• Action Items

  • Michael to help add the Ubuntu local groups pages to the main GNOME site

  • Michael Contact the SysAdmins (Patrick/Olav) for a VM

Getting new users

• The getting GNOME page needs design help https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/

Newcomer involvement

• Dealing with a locked wiki
• Language support for the general website. Where to find resources and mentors in your language
• Newcomers Guides for other areas besides coding contributions
• Not a good way to know about local events and up to date groups (or things like the local group pages on G+ and Facebook)

• Action Items

  • Talk to a sys admin about what we can do about the locked wiki - Alexandre

Performance

• Stats on page load times. How can we improve this?

• Action Items

  • Alexandre Franke to work with someone in Strasbourg on this

Website layout/functionality

• How promote things temporarily better?

Multiple Website Integration

• the website takes you to the wiki, but there's no way back. We should consider using the same header so the header links continue to navigate through the main site.
• Wiki page headers look visually like the main page, but the links are all different, even the logo link

• ACTION: Talk to Tom about helping with this

Recognition of Contributors

• Maybe do this on the Engagement Blog https://blogs.gnome.org/engagement/ @Adelia

Happy Birthday GNOME Website

• Content: https://etherpad.gnome.org/p/bday_website_content

LOCAL GROUPS

The goal of this project is to help GNOME organize at local levels.

Working group for this project:

• Nuritzi
• Link
• Carlos

Note: there are other people helping with more specific initiatives within this project. The people listed above are helping with the strategic direction of the entire Local Groups project.

Planning

Current challenges

The following are GNOME-specific challenges that we have identified around the topic of local groups.

• Resources for local groups
• Celebrating local group activity (photos)
• Finding and tracking existing groups and activities
• Preparation for events, making sure we let the community know when they are happening, and how to participate and give back
• Getting budgets to the local groups, especially when we don't really know them
• Local groups need a point of contact within GNOME to ask for help, resources, etc
• Making sure that the Ambassadors are part of other GNOME teams as well
• Our wiki isn't easy to navigate
• We don't share resources for activities events, so it's hard to build upon what each other is doing
• Communication tools - easy way for people to join the conversation
• Knowing which users / contributors live in your area
• Knowing when the events are in your area (e.g. shared calendar)

Case Study: Fedora Ambassador Program

Jiri helped us learn more about the Fedora Ambassadors program since he says it has worked well for them. Here's a summary of what he said:

• You become a Fedora Ambassador for a particular geographical area
• Fedora Ambassadors have to apply and show that they are ready to represent the project
• Experienced Fedora Ambassadors become mentors for new Ambassador applicants
• The Ambassador is given lifetime ambassador status. It's difficult to measure impact, so hard to make sure they "prove themselves" regularly
• Fedora maintains a list of Ambassadors (active ones only, as tracked by Fedora accounts system (talk to Patrick about this infrastructure)) in their areas so people can easily find them
• The Ambassador knows how the project works and can help new people contribute to the project

• ACTION: Talk to Patrick about the infrastructure for the wiki page

Useful links

• Ambassadors overview: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

• Budget: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/

Design-related:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

• https://pagure.io/design

• https://pagure.io/designassets/tree/master

Themes

These are the main initiatives within the Local Groups project that we have identified. We hope to work on these during the next year or so.

Creating and providing resources

• SWAG
  • We have already started to create SWAG centers by region as a way to help get SWAG out to local organizers.
• Money

  • Fedora: RedHat gives about $100K to Fedora and then they empower the regional Ambassadors. The Ambassadors need to create a budget and plan for what they use the events for. Within each region there is a treasurer. Travel is included in the event budget. Budgets often include travel requests. Funding requests go through a ticketing system and it's approved by the community. Community members have organizational credit cards to help make the purchases, this helps people who don't have enough money to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed. The steps are: budget, approval, payment. The people with the credit cards have to keep track of receipts and be very detailed in their reimbursements / reporting processes.

  • ACTION: find out if we can get GNOME credit cards.

  • ACTION: Nuritzi & Neil to talk to Board about pre-payments for travel policy and also the possiblity of using a travel agency (@Olav to send info about American Express, @Jiri to send info about Fedora travel agency)

  • Three main events to keep in mind for budgets:

    • Conferences: keep having the travel budget approved by the Travel Committee

    • Local events: give budgets to regional ambassadors

    • Hackfests: Board to set a general budget and create a policy around maximum spend per hackfest. Engagement Team approves the hackfest and works with the travel committee.

    • ACTION: Nuritzi to talk to Board more about this. (Working group: Max, Jiri, Carlos, and Nuritzi)

    • ACTION: Talk to Kat about current Travel committee and how it works

    • Resources: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/ For Flock, we use: http://atgtravel.com/

• Templates for events: organizational and presentation templates
• Marketing templates

Design resources for Engagement

• We need more newcomers guides for designers who want to help
  • What file formats to use
  • Where to find resources and assets (logos, templates, color palatte, sticker templates)
  • Page with a collection of important links
  • List of who you can contact if you have design questions

• ACTION: Provide a design request tracker where people can ask for new assets

• ACTION: In the short term, create a design mailing list for people to email requests to

• ACTION: Template for submitting a good request (project design brief)

• ACTION: Max help get people from GNOME Asia on a larger design mailing list so they can help with requests as well

• Provide links to high-quality tutorials on using Gimp, Inkscape, etc to help newcomers transition from Photoshop, Illustrator, etc
• Or how to convert files from proprietary formats into open formats
• Create files in all of the formats, including Adobe

• Reference: http://spreadubuntu.org/

• ACTION: Nuritzi to connect Robin and Kate to Pippin

Information & Communication

• Contacts
• How to find a local group and event
• Celebrating
• Wiki
• Get involved in downstream project groups and offer to give GNOME presentations as their events
• Communication tools
• Connecting local groups to each other

  • ACTION: Create a website page or wiki page with resources for "Spread GNOME" (e.g. spread.ububtu.org)

  • ACTION: Do research on how to use GitLab as a design collaboration tool. Make sure there's a maintainer/moderator to help with deadlines @Kate, Robin, Carlos, Bastian (Jiri as a contact for more info on how Fedora does this)

• Inspiration for GitLab flow: http://opensourcedesign.net/, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork, https://pagure.io/design, https://pagure.io/designassets/tree/master

Ambassador Program

• Regional Ambassadors:

  • ACTION: Identify existing GNOME contributors who are effectively Ambassadors already who can become the initial members of the program -- Nuritzi, Jiri

  • ACTION: Document the purpose of the Ambassadors program, what they do, how to become one and list current active Ambassadors -- Michael Hall, Nuritzi

    • 4 Regions:
      • EMEA (Jiri - Brno)

      • APEC (Max - Taiwan, Siska and Harris - Indonesia, BinLi - Beijing)

      • North America (Nuritzi - San Francisco),
      • Latin America (Julita - Peru, Georges - Brazil)

Celebrating and Publicity

• Collecting photos from all the places
  • After events organizers should thank participants and include a link to how to submit photos

  • Flickr group already exists here for guadec: https://www.flickr.com/groups/3964408@N20/ and general group here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/3009527@N20/

  • ACTION: Nuritzi to ask the GUADEC team to do that

  • Make sure there are master accounts for: Google Photos, Flickr

  • Google photos group: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMpuKRCCImvJL-KYwqboezKUmPUnd-zxN-a9gop0U_lamIaX4pGu0a4ajG_c6efDg?key=YXl5ZVlfNmFKUFlNWWVlSDkzaWZjSTZBbWw0a0xR

  • Wiki page (to be updated with links): https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2017/Photos

  • Photos Working Group: Olav, Cassandra, Max

• Engagement blog use
  • Making sure groups document and publicize their events

  • ACTION: create regional storytellers, revamp the Engagement Blog @Adelia

  • Design help!!
• Get people on Planet GNOME
  • It feels exclusive. e.g. If you post much into Fedora, then they can't join.
  • Maybe we add all of them in the same place but allow category/tag specific feeds
  • Make it easier for people to get on it
  • Have it featured on the website

  • Working group: Olav, Nuritzi, Jiri, Sri, Alberto

• Languages
  • Finding groups that speak your language
  • Planet GNOME in other languages

    • ACTION: Move links to non-english planets (shown in the footer of planet.gnome.org) up to a more visible location - Olav, Nuritzi, Alberto

• Foundation members: where are they located??

  • ACTION: See if we can show where our Foundation members are located (by region or something) -- Tobi, Max, Nuritzi

Other Ideas

• Event pack for local groups and events
• Ambassadors represent GNOME in their local communities, within their organizations, etc. They're like a bridge between users and the project
• Business cards for Ambassadors (or permission to list it on business cards)
• Certificate when becoming an Ambassador
• List of activities that have been successful for other groups and how to organize them
• GNOME has gugmasters-list mail list, we might be able to use this to share ideas and resources (slide, photo, video )
• Maybe we could have local group IM group list. ( Telegram, slack, FB group, twitter )
• Get involved in downstream project groups and offer to give GNOME presentations as their events
• Keeping up a regular schedule
• Shared calendar so people know what is happening where
• Document Foundation has contracts for marketing. We may want to talk about hiring someone to help us implement some of these initiatives

PLANET GNOME

Attendees: Alberto, Adelia, Nuritzi, Jiri, Cassandra, and Sri

Context

Developers started to blog, we needed to aggregate it. Fedora, Mozilla, etc aggregated. We became one of the most-read aggregators. Someone came up with the idea of making it hackergotchis, not having anonymous blogs - it needs to be a person, not a brand or project who is writing it. Because of that, the content is more engaging. If you want to be there, you have to be a GNOME contributor. Now you have to be a Foundation member. When you propose your blog, you have to have blogged about GNOME before so we know that you have quality content. You should have a hackergotchis. We want people's faces because we want an emotional connection. Alberto is an editor.

FAQ and Actions

Do you ever kick people off of Planet GNOME?

• We are supposed to go through and weed out people who are no longer foundation members but we don't do this often.
• If you become an inactive Foundation member you lose your access to Planet GNOME, once you activate again everything is there again.

What are some requirements?

• You have to blog in English.
• It's only for Foundation members. This was because we want to ensure the quality.
• We make an exception for GSoC members. We let them in, they don't have to have blogged before.
• We never kick you out unless you break the code of conduct or your Foundation membership is over.

Does the content have to be GNOME-specific?

• Hopefully you'll blog about GNOME-related things often, but you're encouraged to blog about everything.

What about blogging about what your company does?

• Yes, we want people to blog about what they are doing in their companies and things like that.

Can we make it easier for people to find planets in other languages?

• Planet.gnome.org is meant to be in English. It's a very powerful tool for engaging company sponsorship, etc. Has a very high bar of entry. The Spanish one is hosted somewhere else.

• ACTION: We need to figure out who maintains each local planet.

• ACTION: Create guidelines for local planets. The barrier should probably be lower. @Engagement team to figure out how the local planets work

• ACTION: Figure out how to make it easier to find / contribute to other languages

• ACTION: Update the look and feel of planet.gnome.org to showcase other languages better (at the top!) and then how to find the English one after (continuity!)

Do you use tags?

• Yes, we use tags. We use the feed from the tag that individuals use.

Hackergotchis

• We could potentially have a circle thing and gravatar for it, but we should have some kind of consistency.

Can we aggregate other social media tools?

• For example, how would we add twitter handles? It's partly a design problem. We would like to consolidate these, but don't know where.

Can we get more help for this? (more editors)

• Right now it's a text file and harder to maintain. If we were able to get a web interface -- ACTION: talk to Tom and see if he could create a web app for this.

Alberto might need help to articulate the vision a bit more in order to be able to delegate responsibility to people who want to help edit.

• @Board Alberto may need help adding the GSoC blogs

Summary of New Working Groups

Photos

• Cassandra
• Olav
• Max

Planet GNOME / Blogs

• Olav
• Nuritzi
• Jiri
• Sri
• Alberto

Ambassadors Program

• Jiri
• Nuritzi
• Carlos
• Michael Hall

Ubuntu Migration

• Michael Hall

• Ken VanDine

• Tom Tryf
• Alexandre Franke

Website Personas

• Andreas
• Nuritzi
• Michael
• Sri

Summary of Actions and Next Steps

Adelia

• Create regional storytellers, revamp the Engagement Blog
• Think about how we can recognize contributors on the Engagement Blog better

Alberto

• Move links to non-English planets (shown in the footer of planet.gnome.org) up to a more visible location
• Figure out who maintains each local planet (on Planet GNOME).

Alexandre

• Talk to a sys admin about what we can do about the locked wiki
• Stats on page load times. How can we improve this? Work with someone in Strasbourg on this

Andreas

• Set up a meeting for the website personas group

Bastian

• Do research on how to use GitLab as a design collaboration tool. Make sure there's a maintainer/moderator to help with deadlines (@Kate, Robin, Carlos, Bastian (Jiri as a contact for more info on how Fedora does this))

Carlos

• Do research on how to use GitLab as a design collaboration tool. Make sure there's a maintainer/moderator to help with deadlines (@Kate, Robin, Carlos, Bastian (Jiri as a contact for more info on how Fedora does this))

Jiri

• send info about Fedora travel agency

• Do research on how to use GitLab as a design collaboration tool. Make sure there's a maintainer/moderator to help with deadlines (@Kate, Robin, Carlos, Bastian (Jiri as a contact for more info on how Fedora does this))

• Help figure out how to show more blogs or activity from GNOME community (with Nuritzi, Olav, Alberto and Sri)

Kate & Robin

• Create a design request tracker where people can ask for new assets
• Create a template for submitting a good request (design project brief)
• Create a website page or wiki page with resources for "Spread GNOME" (e.g. spread.ububtu.org) with Nuritzi

• Do research on how to use GitLab as a design collaboration tool. Make sure there's a maintainer/moderator to help with deadlines (@Kate, Robin, Carlos, Bastian (Jiri as a contact for more info on how Fedora does this))

Kevin & Ubuntu

• When users start using GNOME, have content/videos in YELP
• Check with translators/docs team about translating content
• Help create a migration guide for Ubuntu users on the GNOME wiki

Max

• Once the design email list is set up, help get people from GNOME.Asia on it so they can help with design / marketing support requests as well
• See if we can show where our Foundation members are located (by region or something) -- Tobi, Max, Nuritzi

Michael Hall

• Document the purpose of the Ambassadors program, what they do, how to become one and list current active Ambassadors (do this with Nuritzi)
• Help create a migration guide for Ubuntu users on the GNOME wiki
• Help add the Ubuntu local groups pages to the main GNOME site

• Contact the SysAdmins (Patrick/Olav) for a VM

Nuritzi

• Find out if we can get GNOME credit cards
• Talk to Board about pre-payments for travel policy and also the possibility of using a travel agency
• Talk to Kat about current Travel committee and how it works
• Connect Kate and Robin to Pippin
• Create a design mailing list for people to email requests to
• Document the purpose of the Ambassadors program, what they do, how to become one and list current active Ambassadors (do this with Michael Hall)
• Email potential Ambassadors identified at GUADEC and set up a kick off meeting
• Ask the GUADEC 2017 organizers to help email attendees about submitting photos
• Create a website page or wiki page with resources for "Spread GNOME" (e.g. spread.ububtu.org) with Kate and Robin
• Help figure out how to show more blogs or activity from GNOME community (with Olav, Jiri, Alberto and Sri)
• Move links to non-english planets (shown in the footer of planet.gnome.org) up to a more visible location
• See if we can show where our Foundation members are located (by region or something) -- Tobi, Max, Nuritzi
• Talk to the Board about Alberto's needing help adding GSoC blogs

Olav

• Send engagement team info about American Express (re: helping with travel arrangements)
• Help figure out how to show more blogs or activity from GNOME community (with Nuritzi, Jiri, Alberto and Sri)

Sri

• Help figure out how to show more blogs or activity from GNOME community (with Nuritzi, Jiri, Alberto and Olav)

Tom Tryf

• Create a web app for Planet GNOME. Update the look and feel of planet.gnome.org to showcase other languages better (at the top!) and make sure there is continuity so you can easily go from one language to another
• Add something on the homepage that says "Welcome Ubuntu users" and then has a link to a wiki page with information for users and contributors
• Think about how to integrate the wiki and main website better so you can go back and forth between them / it feels more integrated

Unassigned

• For local groups, talk to Patrick about the infrastructure of the wiki pages

• Organize photos from events and improve the How To Submit Photos to GNOME wiki page

  • Figure out what to do with the page for GUADEC 2017 photos: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2017/Photos

• Create guidelines around how the local Planet GNOME process should work
• Find a way to aggregate other social media tools (like Twitter)
• Figure out what Windows users are doing when they reach out gnome.org website