Monitoring of mentions on Twitter

While http://discourse.jupyter.org is a good place to share Jupyter related projects with other developers, I think this is not the right place to increase the visibility of projects to a larger audience.

Twitter can be a great place for this, as can be seen for example in the Twitter accounts of Matplotlib, Manim, and Napari. People mention the Twitter handle in their python-package related project tweets, they get retweeted, and the community can engage with the tweets and projects.

The Jupyter Twitter account has 85k followers, which can give a nice boost to small Jupyter projects. This could be a way to reach e.g. educators or researchers who might otherwise not see these projects.

Hence, the question: Would it be possible to monitor the @ProjectJupyter mentions on Twitter?

I am one of the person who tries to keep things in check on social media when I have a few minutes here and there. Mostly trying sometime to have tweetdeck open to see the projectJupyter IPythonDev, and JupyterCon accounts. I’m doing my best, a couple of other folks also have delegation, and it’s a bit best-effort, especially since Twitter can be a quite toxic place (I experienced this myself about a year ago).

Right now, with the current Jupyter Governance refactor the executive council is working on reshaping the communication/social media priorities and I believe they will see if they want to form a group responsible for monitoring/publishing/replying. So I don’t want to make any decision right now.

I’ve added an item on the EC discussion list linking to this thread, and the EC will probably come back to you.

The Executive Council is currently drafting a charter for a working group to handle social media. If you’d like to discuss this, feel free to come to the Executive Council Office Hours (Tuesday, 10am Pacific time): Jupyter Community Calendar. We’d love to meet you there.

Thanks!

when I have a few minutes here and there

Thanks a lot for this effort! :slight_smile:
In case that the executive council decides to boost the social media strategy, here are some thoughts from my side:

Monitoring twitter is constant work with high responsibility, and I think no one should be expected to be constantly available for that.
In order to keep that work manageable, all Twitter mentions could be monitored only once a week.
That strategy can be communicated to the content creators by adding the Jupyter Twitter account description “@mentions monitored approx. once a week”.
I think Twitter Followers would like that too, as Jupyter content would appear once a week bundled into their timelines.
Also, there could be explicit and communicated breaks for holidays, where the twitter monitoring is paused.

Twitter can be a quite toxic place

I’ve also experienced these cases, and I think they are the unfortunate exception, while the normal case is that people are excited to hear about new open source projects. Especially because Twitter has a diverse community of educators or researchers who are not regular checking scipy-dev forums.
Because of the Matplotlib retweets, I got in contact with Open Source contributors whom I would never have met otherwise, and I think that the Jupyter Twitter account has similar potential to connect the community. From my experience, a retweet from an account with many followers can make the difference if a project dies unseen, or if that project grows a community.

Thanks for the invitation, I’ll try to come next week!