The Forum Contributors Group Initiative 馃惎
Form a team of invested and engaged forum users at GitLab to lead the charge of engaging in the forum.
Goals
- Provide more expert answers in the forum, which cultivates trust in GitLab's resources
- Use experts to create content specifically for the forum
Context
Since the creation of our community forum here at GitLab, there has naturally been people who are drawn to participating. An internal Forum Contributors Group of GitLabbers who enjoy, and are good at, answering forum questions would make a huge difference in controlling how many forum questions get answered.
The forum gets 500k+ views every month, so we know our forum provides value. The Forum Contributors Group will provide the expert-touch that our users want to see from an engaged forum created by a community-centric product like GitLab.
Working Group Roles/Tasks
Check in on the forum posts that are 24+ hours old
- We know that if a community member (non GitLabber) is going to answer, they will do so within 24-48 hours and we want as much community-to-community engagement as possible.
Commit to spending 1 hour a week in the forum
- Suggestion: schedule an hour of your own time, or make it recurring in your own Google calendar to get some forum time in once a week.
- This time could also include organizing, re-categorizing, liking, and marking best answers in the forum.
Consider creating forum topics for the purpose of "knowledge share"
- For example, if you work in support, and you notice a particular support question being asked over and over gain, consider sharing your knowledge of the issue in the forum.
- This will help our users self-serve, and free up time for support to work on other, more complicated, support cases.
To-Dos
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Perfect the moderators duties/guidelines in the handbook -
Schedule a meeting for prospective Forum Contributors Group participants (tentative date: June 11 2020) -
Create a category in the forum for knowledge share content
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Build a Forum Issue Board to internally collaborate on new topics and posts
Have other ideas for The Forum Contributors Group? Comment below!