Notes from the Umbraco Community Roundtable Discussion

We held the second roundtable Discussion in Bristol prior to the Umbraco Spark event with the discussion purpose/topic still being:

How to sustain the continuous development of the Umbraco Project and the Umbraco community. 

At the first roundtable the need for more time as well as doing workshops was expressed allowing for deep dives into relevant areas. Thus, we made these three subtopics, that we believe are key in driving the community:

• Attracting new blood. How to make it more attractive to join the Umbraco Community. How to overcome the 40-year-old white male who knows it all. 25 ways of contributing.
  
  
• Adjust and/or Invent new formats. How are we to meet, real-life/digital meetings? How does it scale? What is the purpose of Our Umbraco e.g. “a digital community hub”? What should be on Our Umbraco? Etc.
  
  
• How do we measure community engagement? How to start measuring the Engagement Score? When is it good, when is it bad? What is important to measure?

 

Participants:

Pete Duncanson, Carole Logan, Jeavon Leopold, Laura Weatherhead, Callum Whyte, Jeffrey Schoemaker, Adam Peter Nielsen replaced by Mikkel Keller Stubkjær, Marc Stöcker, Ilham Boulghallat, Kim Sneum Madsen, Jacob Midtgaard & Niels Hartvig.

After welcome and practicalities, I gave a status since last time (see slide deck). 

After a short discussion on the relevance of the three subtopics, these were agreed upon by all participants. We then got into groups and discussed the topics using the 1-2-4 Brainstorming method: 

METHOD: 1-2-4 Brainstorming on the three subtopics:

1-2-4 is a brainstorming exercise, where you start off alone getting three ideas. You then team up with another person who also has 3 ideas. You need to agree on 3 out of your six ideas. Then you meet with another pair and decide on three ideas. So a total of 12 ideas is reduced to 3 ideas. With 12 people we then end up with 3 groups x 3 ideas.

1. Attracting new blood (Ilham, Jeavon, Callum and Jeffrey)

We need to attract “new blood” to the Umbraco community to survive. The current tech stack of .NET Framework and AngularJS prohibits that slightly. It is possible that whatever tech stack we choose could be considered out of date by some.

We need to find ways to expand interest in Umbraco regardless of the tech we’re using,

focused on features/solutions or using Umbraco with other tech stacks

Notes from the workshop:

Main suggestions by the participants:

• Showcase Umbraco usage with enticing tech
• Promote community builders (Diverse, different faces and experiences,...) 
• Focus on non-tech and on solutions
• Reach other communities  (OSS, Web/JS, Ally)
• Entry-level events (Create a safe space for newcomers and beginners) 

 

Selected ideas / Actionable items that help cover the suggestions above (ordered by feasibility and low-maintenance):

1. Lunch & Learn (Entry-level events / Focus on non-tech and on solutions)
1. 10 to 15 people
2. Focused on a specific topic
3. Targeted to specific person/position (e.g IT Director, Designer, DevOps,...)
4. Organized / Promoted by HQ (Owner: Ilham)
5. Community/HQ expert speakers
6. Mix of “features” and “tech” talks
7. Could be at lunch preferably but will follow local preferences (e.g. Netherlands market/community might not find this suitable while a metropolitan area would be more suitable) 
   
   
2. Tutorials for “enticing” tech (Reach other communities / Showcase Umbraco usage with enticing tech)
1. Create content for tutorials where Umbraco is highlighted in connection with enticing and “trending” tech (Vue JS, React, JAMSTACK)
2. Organized/Owned by the Documentation Curators
3. Collaboration with Lars(Coma) / SEO
4. Focus on existing knowledge
   
   
3. Outreach to Influencers inside and outside the Umbracosphere (Promote community builders / Showcase Umbraco usage with enticing tech / Reach other communities)
1. Relevant influencers to do talks at Umbraco events and bring in their followers from other communities.
2. Organized and owned by selected Umbraco community builders, with a strong network and connection to influencers within the community, but also within other relevant communities
3. HQ helps with support (resources, time, costs)
4. HQ can coordinate with Festivals (and meetups) organizers for booking the influencers as speakers at their events (Arnold potentially) 

 

2. Adjust and/or invent new format (Laura, Marc, Pete and Jacob)

Progress we can make today: auditing existing Umbraco-centric content.

We already have enough content out there we just aren’t using it or displaying it very well. So we suggest we do an audit of all the existing content that Umbraco has out there both HQ and community generated content.

Some ideas of the kind of content we have in mind:

• Video content from Codegarden; it's currently on a hard to find site which is not very friendly to comment on etc. once posted it is sort of forgotten about.
• Community festival videos, audio, slides are scattered all over the place, what is available and where is it? Can we pull it into somewhere central and safe?
• Blog posts (there is a RSS feed looked after by someone in the community maybe leverage this? No idea who looks after it though).
• Who to follow? Who is posting good content, ideas?
• Find community generated content (umbraCoffee, uProfile, youtubers)
• What content is not available or not being created?
• What users are being left out?

Can we score that content?

• How many views have the videos had?
• How old are the videos?
• How generic is the content?
• Who is it aimed at? Editors, developers, managers?

This could be as simple as a spreadsheet or even a separate Umbraco instance built for the job (then we can query/pull out the content via an API).

Actions

• Put the content on Our somewhere, it's been collected and scored so we have the data, doing exciting things with it can come later?
• Create a form to allow community members to log new content (this is currently done in the announcements channel in the community Slack for instance) so making this a format system
• A doc with some instructions on how to submit content or how to repurpose it... Precious Plastic Community does this really well.

Progress we can make today: HQ Steward/Team

A lot of good content is out there that can be repackaged/repurposed but it needs editing or polishing for which we need an editor/steward who can sniff out good content, log it, promote it, etc. going forward. They can encourage new content contributions (so you see someone tweet something interesting and the steward can reach out and say "hey we think this would make a nice short blog post"). This is done to some regard in umbCoffee every week but this makes it a bit more formal.

Actions

• “Appoint” an HQ-backed community content steward
• Create an events summary page (or make it more stand out as none of us can remember if it exists anymore) to remind people that they can start an event.
• Repackage/repurpose the existing content to help generate content and maximise the value from it for little effort, some amazing content is out there.

Progress we can make tomorrow: overhaul Our.Umbraco

Surface the collected content on Our.Umbraco so that it is available when and where it’s needed - include a taxonomy on the content so that people can filter and search by what would be most useful to them. Our.Umbraco should be a reflection of the community, so it would make sense for community-centric and created content to sit centrally on it.

Progress we can make tomorrow: update HQ dashboard 

Stop the HQ dashboard (the page that you see when you log into an Umbraco installation) from being purely marketing focused. Instead pull in content that suits the user type that is using the site. This content should have come from the audit and new content that can be created.

Progress we can make tomorrow: “punchy” content

New "punchy" videos to entice in new users on the outer circle. These should be to encourage users to go deeper. These can be shared by agencies to answer questions, shared by internal developers to managers, decision-makers or those on the fence can come across them. Lunch time-friendly, I should be able to watch them and get fired up. Ideally, make/polished by HQ but the content itself could come from the community. Important that the community members are credited appropriately so that way it doesn't look like theft. 

“Punchy” is defined here as akin to the 3 minutes Ruby on Rails video

Could include topics like:

• How does this compare to WordPress?
• Can it do X?
• Is this right for my project?

Progress we can make tomorrow: drip campaigns

Identify and set up email triggers that fire off emails to users. When a user signs up for Umbraco (on install) or when a new user is created (and we know what type of user they are) we can set off an email chain.

Track backoffice events (Our need a release). Has a user gone into the developer section but not generated a doctype? then tag it. Then we can use that to trigger a "What on earth are doctypes and how they can help you" email.

Progress we can make tomorrow: Cross-pollinate more with other events

Come up with some good generic talks that we can offer to other related meetups. Meetup organisers are always crying out for speakers so this could be an easy way in. However, it can't be sales like as people see right through it so don’t just do a Headless talk instead do a "Maybe you should try a .net CMS with React!".

3. How do we measure community engagement? (Niels, Carole, Mikkel & Kim)

After a lengthy discussion we agreed on the following:

Community engagement scores or how to measure success.

The purpose is to give a widely agreed temperature check of the engagement level of the Umbraco community.

Tasks:

• Document diversity
• Act as social proof
• Help organisers with tooling
• ID relevant engagement scores.
• Balance engagement scores.
• Make findings and numbers public with regular intervals.

Numbers/scores to be considered. We need to start somewhere and we think that the below listed is the starting point:

• New users on GitHub
• New users on Our
• New users on ours karma (over time)
• Total amount of karma (over time)
• Download of Umbraco
• Number of PR on cores and docs
• Use the different concentric circles levels 
• Stats on Documentation
• Github
• Twitter
• Meet-up.com
• Dashboard usage/visits
• What is the diversity score (need definition)

Other:

1. Make Survey tools available for meet-ups/festivals for sessions and/or the event itself.
2. Use survey the friendly way is an OK tool

Who:

HQ.

Timeframe:

This will take time but we will start.

Yet a roundtable with many good thoughts and talks. Also other than listed above. It is now time to work with these. We are all affected by the corona crisis and we will therefore not be able to move forward at the desired speed. However, rest assured that we do not want to skip all the good thoughts and the outcome.

What about the next roundtable? We have not yet settled for when, but we will have one. We have also openly talked about changing a number of participants with other community members, thus ensuring both continuity and fresh ideas.

Thanks to all participants for helping out.