Managing who has direct access to our social media accounts

Project Discussion
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@steiner created this ticket for us to discuss. Based on feedback from Justin, I’m bringing it to Discussion to get input from Mindshare and the wider community.

Current Status

Basically, we have several social media accounts for Fedora, but the Marketing Team only has so much access to those accounts to post regularly. I have direct access to the Mastodon account, but everything else is under other folks.

These are the socials we’d like access to and who seems to currently have access based on the social media wiki page.

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Proposal

Here are two ideas, but it’s possible we end up with a mix of both depending on the response we hear back.

Option 1: Work with people who currently have access to post regularly

I would like to get feedback on how available the current account access holders may be to help the Marketing Team. If we can get at least one person from each platform to commit to being available to publish at least one post every 1-2 weeks, I think we can make that work. The process would be to prepare social media posts in our Gitlab like we already do and ping the person when we have something ready for them to push out. Of course they could be more involved than that, and we would welcome it!

As of now, we have access to the Mastodon and we will soon have access to the LinkedIn thanks to Justin reaching out to LinkedIn directly. We’re missing consistent access to the Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

I have one extra note for the Twitter account. We can make due with posting every week or so, but that’s the platform where we can get away with near daily posts. Our experiment with Mastodon has shown how much material for content there is within the project, so ideally we would like to post more often to Twitter than to the other platforms. It’s an especially easy platform to start putting to work because we would just reuse our Mastodon posts with slight modifications where needed. However, any access to the Twitter would be a good start.

Option 2: Figure out how to decide who else can get access to accounts

Assuming we can’t get volunteers to liaise for the accounts, it would be nice for some of the folks on the team to have access to the accounts. Each individual member doesn’t need access to all the accounts, but if it least we can have enough access to cover all our bases, that would be enough.

Follow up question: how do we decide who to give access to? The Fedora brand is very important for reasons that I think are obvious. It’s a lot of responsibility to share with people.

Based on a marketing meeting we had in December, Justin suggested for us to nominate people to the Mindshare Committee and they would be the ones who decide. I like that idea and I have no other requirements other than that the people be committed to being responsive to the Marketing Team with our requests. But more than that, I have no idea how to come up with requirements for who is a contributor we feel comfortable with. So I sheepishly leave this problem for Mindshare to solve. :sweat_smile:

If anyone has any ideas or input, please share! Since the Marketing Team has pivoted to being mostly focused on leveraging social media for Fedora, this has been the main blocker for us doing more for the project. While we wait for more channels to open up for us, we’ll keep our heads down focusing on the Mastodon account.

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Speaking for myself, taking something pre-generated is something doable for me to post on the channels where I have access. However, I’d prefer to delegate access to others who are coming up with the source, and if my feedback or approval were needed, then I could weigh in as needed.

Thanks to Tweetdeck, Twitter is an easy one for us to manage access to. We can give others access to the @fedora and @fedoracommunity Twitter accounts through their personal Twitter accounts, without having to share passwords.

Instagram requires sharing a password, so this one needs to be handled more delicately. However, if we have a trusted member of the Social Media Admin Team willing to handle Instagram, we can coordinate that one as needed.

Facebook is an odd one though. I don’t have a Facebook account but I think we have folks either at Red Hat or in the community who could help us manage access.

I think one filter we could use is how someone becomes a formal member of the Marketing Team. Then it would make a process for the Mindshare Committee easier, so instead of validating someone as worthy or not, it would be easier to understand the nominee’s contributions as an existing contributor to the Marketing Team. Then we could add them to the Fedora Social Media Admin Team where they receive access.

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Along these lines… You should probably remove me from access to these accounts. While still a very happy Fedora user, I rarely get the chance to contribute in any substantial way to marketing or mindshare activities. Trimming me out as “inactive” should help you have a more accurate estimate of coverage across accounts. Thank you for the reminder!

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@pfrields Acknowledged! I’ve made your request as well as for other group sponsors here:

https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/11088

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Thanks @jflory7 !

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Ok, thanks for being a backup just in case!

Touché. I though about this a little and this is a first draft of what we can consider. Formal members of the Marketing Team should meet the following requirements.

  1. Been in the Fedora Project for x amount of time.
  2. Been in the Marketing Team for x amount of time.

Then, when it comes to consideration for being added to the social media access group by the Mindshare Committee, you have the next requirements.

  1. Fill a need for coverage on targeted platforms.
  2. Be nominated by a member of the Marketing Team OR based on a vote by team members.

My thinking behind only adding folks to have access when there’s a need is to not have more people with access… than we needed. We minimize exposure that way. The sweet spot would probably be 2-3 people who have access and they can overlap between the platforms. I would expect the FCAIC, Project Leader, and Program Manager to also have access even though they won’t be as involved as a fail-safe.

I think this is a fine rough framework? Still undecided on the amount of time for each of those criteria. On one end I want to have a bar that’s high enough to protect the brand but not so high that we’re gate-keeping. Ideally the folks who have this access have been around the project for a little, understand what Fedora is about, and participate in the community. If they get the spirit of Fedora, that will help a ton not just for trustworthiness, but also for content and curation.

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Perhaps this could be a number of releases.

Especially for teams where a “contribution” is not clearly measured (e.g. a code commit or package built), I find team-driven nominations to work very well. For example, an existing member of the Marketing Team could nominate someone else to become a member, and the existing Marketing Team members take a vote on the nomination.

This is similar to how the DEI Team does it, and this model has worked well for us.

Agreed. I think having a handful of active folks for each platform is a better approach than adding everyone to every platform. For example, I typically would do more with Twitter than Instagram because it is my personal preference. I use Twitter with my own account but I don’t really use Instagram personally.

One other filter to consider is membership in another team or group. I agree that knowledge about other parts of Fedora will help a lot, plus if someone has background in some other part of the project, they can likely represent that context in what we promote and give visibility to.

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I’m unsure about going with number of releases because someone could have started with the project from one release party and seen their second release 6 months later.

What about this:

  1. To join the marketing team, you need to have been involved in the project for 3 months and actively interacting with the marketing team for at least 1 month. Then someone would nominate you to join the formal team, and if it passes you’re in.
  2. To become a member of the social media group, you need to have been involved for 12 months and a member of the marketing team for at least 3 months (this amount for length of time in the marketing team is somewhat arbitrary). Then someone from the marketing team would nominate you to the Mindshare Committee and they vote.
  3. You could of course be contributing to other areas of the project that are not just marketing. There is no conflict.
  4. You could contribute to the marketing team, and as long as you hang around for a month and want it, you will likely be voted into the team.

Does this work? I originally set the bar for joining the team at 6 months to try to catch at least one release cycle, but I think that’s too much. I’m thinking of the potential contributor asking about joining the marketing team after a release party and how they would feel at being told that they won’t be a formal member of the team for at least 6 months. A 1 month “probationary” period would probably be enough to catch folks who may not be interested in the long-term. A period of 12 months seems good for access to official social media, though.

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Love that!

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@joseph This seems like a good start, although one question I foresee you getting is what “involved in the project” means. One thing I am cautious about is that requiring a fixed period of involvement without specifying what involvement means will result in some people not being selected, who would actually be a great fit.

Personally, I am more in favor of an individual Marketing Team member deciding what constitutes involvement and participation, and making that decision themselves by putting forward a nomination for the team to discuss.

Does this make sense?

(Also, another thing to emphasize is that extra steps for gaining access to social media doesn’t mean people can’t contribute ideas, just that we aren’t handing out passwords freely! Our credentials are not open source. :laughing:)

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Joining the Marketing Team

Let’s separate this into two parts then. In order to join the Marketing Team:

  1. You must have been collaborating with the Marketing Team for at least a month.
  2. After that, someone in the team can nominate you to join the team.
  3. If the vote passes, you’re in.

That period of a month will start based on the first message that can be cited where we started working together. For example, you say you want to help with marketing on January 1, so 30 days later is when you would be eligible to be nominated. This of course is not a meaningful requirement. Your reputation would be validated by the nomination. All the time stamp would do is keep us accountable to giving someone time to actually participate.

After that, either a team member can reach out to that person confirming if they would like to be nominated or maybe that person themselves can ask to be considered. Then the team votes on it. I think that’s fair and the bar is relatively low because it will be higher for getting access to social media.

Another point I would consider is how long someone should be considered part of the Marketing Team. As long as you’re active, I think you’re fine. If you’re inactive for a year, I think at that point you can be considered an inactive member and would have to be voted back into the team.

What about the social media group?

To become a member of the social media group:

  1. You must have been involved in the Fedora Project for 9 months at least.
  2. You must be a member of the Marketing Team for at least 3 months.
  3. There must be a need for someone to gain access to a social media account as judged by the Marketing Team or Mindshare Committee.
  4. Then someone from the Marketing Team would nominate you to be added to the social media group and the Mindshare Committee would vote on that.

I think that this model tied with how we would add people to the Marketing Team works because of the time commitment it would require. Similarly to the Marketing Team, that question of “how long have you been involved in the project” would be answered by some kind of join date or first post in the forum - something like that which can be linked to.

I can also imagine we use this more as guidelines than hard and fast rules. In the end, the real thing that makes you part of the Marketing Team or social media group is a group of contributors putting it to vote, so I think that we can have discretion on when exceptions should be made to move things along.

How does this sound?

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Overall, I think this is a good approach. You may want to be more explicit about the vote process, though. Does a majority vote suffice? Must it be unanimous?

I agree that there’s no need for a “term limit” on this team.

One thing that’s missing is a process for removing people who aren’t inactive. In an ideal world, there’d never be a cause for that. But let’s say someone is posting irrelevant material on a social channel in a way that doesn’t violate the code of conduct but also makes it clear we don’t want them to have access. What do we do? It’s far better to have a process in place in advance than to have to invent one on the fly (although we hope that we’d never need to use it).

I think the Docs Team charter is a good example to follow (although I’m biased because I wrote the bulk of the initial version).

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That charter is really good and I’m comfortable with copying from it verbatim. Part of my would like to work off of a consensus model, but I don’t have a ton of experience with that and I think the transparent nature of the work will help folks err on the side of going with the flow unless they see a significant problem that needs to be addressed. Mostly, I’m fine with this for the purposes of getting started. We can switch to a consensus model later if we want to, unless someone who is or would like to become a team member wants to have us be consensus based as of now.

Amendments

  • In order to be voted into the Marketing Team, a simple majority of the Marketing Team must vote in favor.
  • In order for a team member to be removed from the Marketing Team, a 2/3 vote must pass to remove the person in question.
  • At least 1/3 of all team members must vote on people joining or leaving the team in order for that vote to be considered valid.

Because it seems like we’ve mostly landed on a structure, I’ll set a reminder to check on this in a week. I’ll bundle together the two sets of criteria and start working on the action items for each to get them implemented.

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I think it’s fine to go with a majority (or supermajority for some decisions, like kicking a person out) rules model. A consensus model is necessarily slower and has a bit of a bias toward inaction. That’s good for governance bodies, but a poor fit for teams that need to get work done.

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I like this. It feels low enough of a barrier to be flexible for people coming in from different backgrounds and levels of experience with Fedora, Open Source, or tech at large.

I am neutral. I generally like it and it is definitely better than what we have now (i.e. smoke and mirrors), but I also concur with what you wrote:

Perhaps of greater importance than the rules themselves is having rules on how to change the rules later. :grinning: The Marketing Team may find these steps work great, or perhaps after some time, some tweaking is needed based on the lived experience of implementing them. I think if there are some steps or guidelines on how to change the rules, then we have all we need to make a first attempt at bringing some needed structure around social media.

@joseph Thanks for your work and efforts on this! I know it can be slow-going at times, but it is good work, and I appreciate you leading on this.

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I think the rules to change the rules can be pretty simple too.

How to change the rules for the Marketing Team

  1. Team member suggests a change to the rules, policy, or structure.
  2. Team votes on the change and passes with a majority vote. A minimum of 1/3 of the Marketing Team must vote in order for the motion to be valid (same quorum as for adding or removing members).

To be honest, I don’t think that changing rules and such needs to be that restricted because ideally most of the decisions we’re making are part of collaboration and not tied to policy. To your point, only now are we getting to point of having consistent output. I don’t think we need too much structure at this moment.

If we would still like additional safeguards, I would be fine with the following options. One option is to increasing the votes in favor minimum to 2/3, which is the same as what’s needed to remove a team member. Another option is to have the Mindshare Committee approve a rules change after it passes in the Marketing Team. Personally I would like to keep this process simple, but I throw out that last option as an idea.

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At this point I think things have settled enough, so I’m going to put all of the proposed guidelines together into one post just in case there is still more feedback. We’ll take this to our first Marketing Team meeting in a while to approve via vote.

How to join the Marketing Team

In order to join the Marketing Team:

  1. You must have been collaborating with the Marketing Team for at least a month.
  2. After that, someone in the team can nominate you to join the team.
  3. Your nomination will be put to vote to in the team. A simple majority of the Marketing Team must vote in favor. At least 1/3 of all team members must vote on people joining or leaving the team in order for that vote to be considered valid.
  4. If the vote passes, you’re in.
  5. In order for a team member to be removed from the Marketing Team, a 2/3 vote must pass to remove the person in question.

How to get social media access

To become a member of the social media access group:

  1. You must have been involved in the Fedora Project for 9 months at least.
  2. You must be a member of the Marketing Team for at least 3 months.
  3. There must be a need for someone to gain access to a social media account as judged by the Marketing Team or Mindshare Committee.
  4. Then someone from the Marketing Team would nominate you to be added to the social media group and the Mindshare Committee would vote on that.

How to change the rules for the Marketing Team

  1. Team member suggests a change to the rules, policy, or structure.
  2. Team votes on the change and passes with a majority vote. A minimum of 1/3 of the Marketing Team must vote in order for the motion to be valid (same quorum as for adding or removing members).
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Overall, I think this is solid and you have something to put into motion. And having some rules on how to change the rules means that you can revisit this too.

One thing to consider is that as the team size grows, some people may become inactive. This happens more often than one might think. One way of mitigating this while still allowing people to come and go without holding up key decisions is using the lazy consensus decision-making model. The DEI Team has some guidance on how we use that as our decision-making model in our docs:

To ratify this, we should also have some updates to the Mindshare Committee documentation about this. We could draft what it looks like in a HackMD pad and convert it to docs later.

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