Welcome to the Engagement Team!

The Engagement Team helps GNOME thrive by facilitating communication between users, contributors, partners, and anyone else who might be interested in the GNOME project. If you're interested in promoting free software or helping to improve the GNOME community in any way, you've found the right team to join.

We use GitLab (this website), to track requests from the community and plan our initiatives. If you need help learning how to use GitLab, check out our documentation resources here. Newcomers are always welcome!

Engagement team priorities 2021-2022

The Engagement Team focuses on marketing, design, social media, conferences, events, and everything in between.

During 2021 we will be prioritizing the following projects:

1. Give our public face a fresh look

Our website is our public face. It has not been updated in some time and could use a refresh. We will be focused on redesigning it to look more appealing to people who don’t know our project. This redesign will happen in two stages: restructuring and design. In 2021 we will work on updating the infrastructure and restructuring our content. The GNOME Project and the GNOME Foundation websites will be split, leaving more room for each to share specialized content for their different audiences.

2. Improve the onboarding process

A newcomer's journey can be difficult, GNOME is a large and complex project. That complexity shouldn’t be an obstacle to a newcomer's engagement. Every person interested in contributing should be able to read up to date documentation and find people to talk to easily. In 2021 we will be looking at the existing newcomer journey and making improvements.

3. Be the voice of the community

We have a flourishing community that is doing a lot of good work. The general public should be able to see our contributors’ achievements. To help with this visibility we will produce monthly transparency reports and keep our social media channels updated and engaged.

4. Finding sustainable ways to support the community

The Foundation was primarily created to support the GNOME Community but maintaining our infrastructure has a cost. We will be focusing on finding reliable sources of income to help provide continued and new services to our community.

5. Ensure we have a cohesive community with close bonds

Large projects such as GNOME need their community to have strong ties keeping them together. The Foundation is in charge of the organization of events with GUADEC being our most notable. As we move to more remote events we need to make sure we still provide opportunities to connect and socialize with each other. In 2021 the Engagement Team will be looking into more ways to achieve this.

How do I get involved with or request help from the Engagement Team?

We have created various project boards on GitLab to help you seek help and get involved. Here is a brief description of each of the main boards you may wish to visit:

• Events: Plan large-scale GNOME event details and logistics (GUADEC, GNOME.Asia).
• Event Sponsorship Requests: Request support, funding, and SWAG for your event, release party, or local team.
• Social Media and News: Get help developing articles or posts, request promotion of GNOME-related items, coordinate official GNOME channels.
• Engagement Assets: Access all of the files, images, or other assets used by the Engagement Team.
• General: You are currently seeing the General Engagement board. We use this board to plan our team initiatives.

For more detailed descriptions, view the details section of each of the above boards.

The Engagement Team has five main areas of focus. You can also get involved by joining one of these subgroups or attending working group meetings.

• Social Media team | coordinator: @Chenriksen
• Events and Conferences | coordinator: @kristiprogri
• Onboarding | coordinator: @sri
• Graphic Design | coordinator: @Chenriksen

Working group meetings for these subgroups are scheduled on events.gnome.org.

How should I use this General Engagement board?

Use this board to:

1. See which initiatives the Engagement Team is working on and start participating
2. Propose new initiatives for the Engagement Team
3. Request general marketing support

Do not use this board to:

3. File bugs for GNOME software
4. Propose technical initiatives

Note: Whenever possible, please use labels when you create a new issue. This will help get your request in front of the right people more quickly!

If you'd like to learn more about what the Engagement Team does, you can take a look at our pages on the GNOME wiki. If you'd like to chat with us, join the #engagement RocketChat channel, and join our monthly meetings.