We allow anyone to post on our #learning-topics forum channel on our company Discord. When we believe that a tech has a strong active discussion or enough traction for it to be worthwhile to understand deeper, we will go through the process of documenting it on our tech radar and attempt to apply it to our company projects.

We need a way to determine who is participating in our tech radar and at what stage. For this, we will have two roles on our Discord:

• evangelist: individuals who are interested in convincing developers that a certain technology is what they need or should be the next industry standard.
• advocate: individuals who have helped the company adopt new technology and are interested in maintaining compliance to that tech and listening to developer’s needs and providing adequate help.

Users on our Discord can have either or both of these roles. For instance:

• start out as an evangelist
• grow and become and advocate
  • stay as an advocate, or
  • introduce another new tech and become both an evangelist and advocate

Why have these roles?

On top of allowing us to track who and how many people are participating in our Tech Radar, it also helps us understand who is in charge of what technology in the radar.

Once a new technology is adopted, the story does not end there. We need advocates to make help developers be successful with a platform or a technology, or make the tough decision to deprecate an old technology for a new one. This requires follow-up on projects to make sure they are using it correctly and be able to focus on their work.