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Mattermost - Tips and Best Practices

Engaging with Community 

Mattermost takes pride in working with the community and we encourage each Mattermost developer to find one or more community members to work with. Here is a basic three-step process for engaging with the community:

1. Welcoming - Be welcoming and warm to new members. Go out of your way to say hello, offer them help and overall make them feel like part of the Mattermost tribe.
2. Shepherding - Find pull requests members are struggling with. Offer to help get their issues resolved. Go as far as helping them write code, such as making small improvements or adding unit tests. Not every person is familiar with every part of the system. When in doubt start with the oldest pull request.
3. Guidance - Once someone has been shepherded, then offer to guide them. Make suggestions on what the community would like to see next. For instance, you could say Hey that was a cool <feature/improvement> you submitted, but we have a lot of people asking about feature <XYZ>, would you like to try? I can help you if needed. Another option is to suggest them to work on a Mattermost campaign. Overall, make them feel like part of the Mattermost tribe.

Video calls are also encouraged, something many find richly satisfying. Sample questions to start the video calls with include

1. Where in the world do you live? (great conversation starter)
2. How did you get involved with Mattermost?
3. Anything we can do to improve the contributor process?

For an excellent video on how to build effective open source campaigns, see here.