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Community Rules, Best Practices, and Etiquette
Digital.gov looks to drive conversation and engagement which facilitates inter-agency conversations to drive efficiency and innovations in the federal sector. To create a safe space that fosters collaboration and knowledge-sharing, Digital.gov has documented some rules, best practices, and general etiquette to keep our members interested and coming back for more.
Digital.gov can help increase interest, awareness, and membership of existing or new groups. Depending on the topic, our team will help CoP Leads promote a group, especially among other communities, to increase its members. If you are looking to increase membership, please send us an email at digitalgov@gsa.gov.
Tips from community leads to increase engagement of community members:
- Keep a list of community-related articles in a backlog to help spur discussion in the LISTSERV.
- Pose a question to the group related to a shared article. Ex. "How do you negotiate what a plain language review of a document means?"
- Use keywords in a message subject line to let readers know right away what type of content you're sharing. Ex. Use “[Discuss]” to get folks to start a conversation or "[Action]" when you're expecting them to do something.
- When meeting in person, small groups give you the opportunity to learn more about the attendees. Take the opportunity to do a round of introductions to see who's joining you and what they're interested in. A fun ice breaker question like "What's your favorite board game?" is great to just get people started talking.
- If you're seeing a lot of questions around the same topic, lead the group in putting together a resource for it. Gather what's come up so far in conversations and summarize the information to give people a seeded start in contributing.
Digital.gov provides LISTSERV as a tool for communities to communicate and share knowledge. Some settings like content and subscriptions approvals will be established as a standard practice.
If you want to know more about the settings and how to manage the LISTSERV, check out the LISTSERV manual. You can also directly contact our administrator, Mark Kaprow at mark.kaprow@gsa.gov.
Community Leads and Co-Leads may need to approve content based on their LISTSERV settings. To review and approve or reject content, you can:
Approve via email (there is no email disapproval mechanism)
- List owners and moderators will receive an email notification when new content is posted to the LISTSERV.
- Click the link provided in the confirmation email or else reply back to listserv@listserv.gsa.gov with just the two characters, OK. Case does not matter.
- Make sure to delete your signature block, and all other text in the email, to prevent the LISTSERV from replying back that it does not understand your command.
Approve/Reject in the LISTSERV web portal
- Go to https://listserv.gsa.gov/cgi-bin/wa.exe?LOGON=INDEX.
- Sign into LISTSERV using your email and password.
- Go to the “List Management Dashboard” for your list(s).
- Check the section on the page called, “Moderation.”
- Email(s) awaiting approval will be noted in this section.
- Review any pending emails.
- Change the state to Approve or Reject.
Community Leads and Co-Leads may need to approve subscribers based on their LISTSERV settings. To review and approve or reject a subscriber, you can:
Approve via email (There is no email disapproval mechanism)
- List owners and moderators will receive an email notification when a new subscriber asks to join a LISTSERV.
- Click the link provided in the confirmation email to make a decision on the subscription request.
Approve/Reject in the LISTSERV web portal
- Go to https://listserv.gsa.gov/cgi-bin/wa.exe?LOGON=INDEX.
- Sign into LISTSERV using your email and password.
- Go to the “List Management Dashboard” for your list(s).
- Use the left navigation to select “Subscriber Management.”
- Input the subscriber’s email address into the field at the bottom of the page.
- Select “Do Not Notify User” to prevent the user from getting an email, if you want.
- Click “Add Subscriber.”
Digital.gov is run by GSA Technology Transformation Service (TTS), so our channels and any communications sent by community members must comply with the TTS Code of Conduct. In addition to the Code of Conduct, community leads should consider:
- Is this content relevant or interesting for my members? If no, then don't share the information.
- Does this content attempt to sell or promote a fee-based or commercial product? If yes, then don't share this information.
- Are my members likely going to engage or reply to this content? If no, then don't share the information.
Monitoring LISTSRV email errors is a joint effort between CoP leads and Digital.gov. Below is a list of responsibilities and a distribution template for CoP leads and Digital.gov management to use.
- CoP Managers will monitor notifications of email rejections.
- When a CoP Manager identifies an issue with several potential auto-deletes from the same agency, the CoP Manager will:
- Use the template email below to alert the subscriber about the issue
- Include all individual emails in the BCC line of the email
- Include DigitalGov@gsa.gov in the CC line of the email, so we can track cross-CoP issues or look at the issue across other CoPs
- Digital.gov will take action to look at the issue across other CoPs and alert individuals in the same agency experiencing the issue. Digital.gov will also work with the GSA LISTSERV administrator to try to address errors that are occurring at specific agencies.
Below is an email template to use to encourage individuals to make an effort to stay signed up for your community, and to report the issue to their IT department.
SUBJECT: Don’t Miss Out on the [ENTER CoP NAME] LISTSERV
Hello,
We received a notification that your email address isn’t accepting emails from our [ENTER CoP NAME] LISTSERV.
Unfortunately, this notification likely means that the email server at [ENTER AGENCY] is rejecting our LISTSERV emails, especially since we’ve seen a few other notifications from your agency.
Please report this issue to your IT department as soon as possible. If this issue isn’t resolved promptly, our LISTSERV platform may automatically remove your account after three unsuccessful probe messages.
To determine if you have been removed from the LISTSERV, send the following command to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GSA.GOV in the body of the email with nothing in the subject line:
CONFIRM [ENTER LISTSERV NAME]
For example, for the A/B Testing Community, it would be: “CONFIRM ABTEST”
This will tell LISTSERV that your account works and that you still want to receive mail from the [ENTER CoP NAME] list.
If you receive notification that you are not subscribed to the LISTSERV, sign up again for the Community of Practice at https://digital.gov/communities/.
While the CONFIRM command will solve your immediate problem, it could be a matter of time until you find yourself in the same situation again. Errors should be reported to your computer or network support staff as soon as possible so they can be corrected.
Thank you again for your interest in the Digital.gov Communities of Practice. We hope to keep you updated on the latest innovations and knowledge-sharing related to your topics of interest.
Thank you,
[CoP Lead Name]
Some communities hold regular community meetings or “huddles” to improve connections, increase knowledge-sharing, and gather inputs from members. These meetings are on a monthly or quarterly basis with a limited agenda focused on letting the community members discuss their work, challenges, a news topic, or ask questions among the group.
Please note that any Huddles or Meetings that communities want to turn into Digital.gov resources must follow our Event Process guidelines.
Below are a few types of huddles:
- Open forums where just a topic is provided to members to discuss.
- Use case discussion which allows 2-3 projects to explain how they implemented or approached a problem and members can discuss.
- Information gathering which is focused on asking members for their feedback or inputs regarding a specific topic, piece of content, working group, or ideas for future content/events.
To run a huddle, Digital.gov recommends taking the following steps:
- Try to identify a good day and time that’s repeatable for the Community Leads and Co-Leads (e.g., second Tuesday of the month). Considering coordinating this time with Digital.gov resources as well.
- Set up a recurring calendar hold for your huddle and distribute it to your community members. (Do not provide recurring web conferencing details in case you need to alter them later or change the password to a meeting.)
- Schedule captioning for the huddle. (Approximately 15% of the U.S. population has some difficulty hearing according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.)
- Send a reminder and details about the focus of the meeting roughly 1-2 weeks prior to it. (You also can do other promotions or send another reminder the day before and day of the huddle, but it’s not always necessary.)
- Host the meeting.
- Turn off your notifications and phones.
- Make sure participants can mute/unmute as needed.
- Record the huddle (if appropriate).
- Provide the captioning link in the chat.
- Set the ground rules for the meeting and remind them of the topic.
- Have some staged questions or transitions between topics or speakers.
- Thank everyone for attending.
- Download and save the captioning after the huddle.
- Download and save video, chat transcripts, and presentation into the same folder as the captioning.
- Send a follow up note or a re-cap of the huddle to the Community to continue the discussion. (Try to add a call to action or ask a question to increase engagement.)
- Provide Digital.gov with a copy of the recording, captioning, and chat transcripts if you are interested in turning the huddle into a resource or other piece of content.
Digital.gov often will help support the first 3-4 huddles for communities, then allow them to set up and manage their own huddles moving forward. We will continue to check-in on the huddles, but the Community Lead(s) will be responsible for organizing and running them.
If any huddle is recorded and might have valuable content to post on Digital.gov, please email us at digitalgov@gsa.gov and we’ll review to see if we can make it into a resource, news post, or find another means to distribute it to your community.
Digital.gov manages several channels for communities to share news, resources, guides, training and other information. To submit something to Digital.gov or review some of our typical formats for information sharing, visit our Contribute page.
In addition to to the website, we also provide share information via:
- Digital.gov Newsletter. Subscribe to receive this newsletter once a week. We include a feature article with links and promote upcoming events, recent content, open opportunities and more.
- Social Media (🐦 @Digital_Gov or 👤 @DigitalGov). Follow us to get updates about upcoming events or recent content. We sometimes share links about other federal agency technologies, implementations or success stories.
- Internal LISTSERVs. Digital.gov can share notices or messages across our various communities, or directly with all of our CoP Leads and Co-Leads.
Digital.gov regularly accepts articles, blog posts, events, presentations, resources, tools, and other content for this site from federal employees at various agencies and other contributors.
Please note, however, we must follow the GSA Office of General Counsel (OGC) and TTS’ Outreach Team additional guidance regarding steps to mitigate any concerns regarding contributors, speakers or presenters that are not federal employees. This information has been posted in the TTS Handbook for your reference.
If you need a copy of the materials in the handbook or additional information, email us at digitalgov@gsa.gov. For more information about how to contribute and what we are looking for when it comes to contributions, check out our Contribute page.
🎉Questions? Email digitalgov@gsa.gov