Updates to Community Response section and page

| Discord | A [GitLab Community Discord](https://discord.gg/gitlab) is a place to connect with the community, join pair coding sessions and live streams, and discuss all things GitLab and contribution. | [Community Discord Workflows](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/workflows-tools/discord/) |

| Common Room | We use [Common Room](https://www.commonroom.io) to aggregate and review insights from our community engagement. | [Common Room Workflows](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/workflows-tools/common-room/) |

#### Community Response

Given the Developer Advocate team's understanding of our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we will engage in the response of situations that require intervention to address urgent and important concerns of our community members. We have a documented process for how we [manage these situations](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/developer-advocacy/community-response/).

### Consulting

Developer Advocates serve as consultants and subject matter experts (SMEs), leveraging their expertise and experience to support teams and customers with product features, new SKUs, and other topics.

### Other activities

#### Community Response

Given the Developer Advocate team's understanding of our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we will engage in the response of situations that require intervention to address urgent and important concerns of our community members. We have a documented process for how we [manage these situations](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/developer-advocacy/community-response/).

#### Event support

The Developer Advocate team plays a key role in supporting events. We work closely alongside [Corporate Event Marketing](/handbook/marketing/integrated-marketing/corporate-events/) to provide strategic content and assistance for both corporate and third-party sponsored events. This collaboration ensures the success and seamless execution of various gatherings. To learn more please refer to the [Events page](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/events/).

## 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.

Given the developer advocacy team's familiarity with our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we engage in situations that require GitLab to address urgent and important concerns of our community members.

Our team uses the [Community response board](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/-/boards/2727876?&label_name[]=Community%20response) to organize tasks.

#### Monitoring automation

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](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/workflows-tools/zapier/#current-zaps) to post mentions of GitLab in a Slack channel.

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 RSS feeds 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.

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. 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:

  * Posts that reach the front page and contain the keyword "GitLab" are shared in the [#dev-advocacy-team](https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/CMELFQS4B) Slack channel with additional tags for @dev-advocates and @sytses

  * Note: for both of these automations many posts and comments are captured that do not require a response. For example, posts that link to an open source project hosted on GitLab.

* **GitLab Forum**:

  * [Set up a Zap](/handbook/marketing/developer-relations/workflows-tools/zapier/) that posts on the relevant Slack channel created for internal response coordination. The trigger will be any new post created on the monitored thread in the forum. Depending on the topic's activity, this might mean quite a lot of unfiltered traffic. In this case, the Zap updates could be temporarily turned off at the discretion of the DRI assigned to monitor, and only manually posts that require a response.

  * Optionally, everyone in the response team can subscribe to the specific forum thread to distribute the task of monitoring.

  * Everyone in the response team can subscribe to alerts for the specific forum thread to distribute the task of monitoring.

* **Blog Posts**:

  * When there is a forum post linked to from the blog post announcing a change, it is recommended that comments will be disabled to encourage engagement on the forum post and for more efficient monitoring. Check the blog handbook [to disable comments](/handbook/marketing/blog/#comments).

  * If comments are enabled, new comments will be posted in the [#mentions-of-gitlab](https://gitlab.slack.com/messages/mentions-of-gitlab) Slack channel. Please join that channel for more efficient monitoring.