Amplifying GDE impact: How we source stories at Google

GDE stories featured on the Google Developers Blog

As a Google Developer Expert, you might have come across our Google Developers Blog, Medium publication, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages and read about some tremendous projects that your fellow GDEs have worked on. The GDE community is fortunate to have an active developer community that works on meaningful projects that create real impact, inspire collaboration, or are just simply fun projects. Examples from the community include a food delivery app built during the pandemic by Gastón Saillén (Android & Firebase), college student Liza Goldberg (Google Earth) using her expertise to fight climate change, and Danielle Monteiro (Google Cloud) breaking down barriers in her home country of Brazil and blazing the way for women developers. All of these stories highlight how GDEs leverage Google technologies to create meaningful impact. The Google team monitors GDE stories through a variety of platforms and is always looking to amplify the incredible contributions. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how we source stories and amplify your hard work, this is the post for you as we take you behind the curtain and outline how we process and vet stories through the lens of Google. Let’s walk through a few ways we find stories.

Community platform submissions

GDEs submit their activities on a community platform. Submissions may include written content, videos or podcasts, talks, workshops, and more. The program team reviews submissions on a weekly basis and shares stories that meet the submission guidelines. At times, the team will reach out to the GDE to learn more about the activity and develop a story in the form of a blog post or video. Let’s walk through a recent example of how we wrote a blog post on Carlos Azaustre’s YouTube milestone.

1. Carlos submits his story on the community platform.
2. Our team reviews and approves the submission then flags it as a potential story for a blog post.
3. Once our team decides to pursue the story, we reach out to Carlos to set up a 30 minute interview.
4. We conduct the interview with Carlos and ask questions related to his background as a developer, experience as a GDE, and product expertise.
5. We draft the story, publish the story, and amplify reach via social media channels.

Twitter and LinkedIn

We also identify GDE activity on Twitter and LinkedIn. The following actions can ensure we do not miss important GDE activities that we want to share.

1. Mention the Twitter account @GoogleDevExpert or the Google Developers account @GoogleDevs.
2. Use the #GoogleDevExpert or #GDE hashtags.

Medium submissions

Another platform GDEs can leverage is our GDE Medium publication. This publication consists of stories written by product experts at Google and GDEs themselves. Examples of stories published include sharing a developer’s journey, Google technology updates, GDEs collaborating, and more. There are a few simple steps to submit stories for publishing.

1. Reach out to the team to get added as a writer to the GDE Medium publication. Reference the GDE Welcome Guide for this process.
2. Draft a story or identify one of your stories you want to submit.
3. Go into the story and click on the three dots on the top right:

4. Click on ‘Add to publication’ then select the GDE Medium publication.

5. The story is reviewed and published if it meets our submission guidelines.

6. If the team has questions about the story, we will reach out.

Conclusion

We love to showcase the amazing work of our global GDE community! We encourage the community to leverage these platforms to have their stories shared and we thank you for your impact!