Weekly Wonder: Async CUG Participation - Using Confluence and Jira for Non-Meeting Engagement

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Hi CUG Leaders! This week, we’re exploring how to make CUG participation more flexible, inclusive, and sustainable through async engagement using Confluence and Jira.

Not every valuable community interaction needs to happen in a live meeting. Members may be in different time zones, balancing customer work, managing packed calendars, or simply more comfortable contributing after they have had time to think. When CUG leaders create strong asynchronous participation paths, more people can learn, ask questions, share examples, and influence the community without needing to attend every session in real time.

Confluence and Jira are especially well suited for this kind of non-meeting engagement. Confluence can become the shared knowledge hub where discussions, recaps, ideas, and resources live. Jira can help organize requests, topics, feedback, and follow-up actions so the community’s momentum does not depend on one meeting or one person’s inbox.

Below are five practical tips to help you use Confluence and Jira to support async CUG participation.

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1. Create a Confluence home base for async participation

Start by giving members one clear place to go when they want to participate outside of meetings. A dedicated Confluence page or space can serve as the home base for upcoming topics, meeting recaps, discussion prompts, shared resources, recordings, and ways to contribute.

Make the page easy to scan and easy to act on. Include sections such as “This month’s discussion,” “Questions we’re collecting,” “Resources from past sessions,” and “How to suggest a topic.” When members know where to find information and how to add their voice, async participation becomes a normal part of the CUG experience rather than an afterthought.

2. Use discussion prompts to invite thoughtful contributions

Async engagement works best when members are not just asked to “share thoughts,” but are given specific prompts that make participation easy. In Confluence, add a short prompt before or after a session and invite members to comment with examples, questions, lessons learned, or challenges they are facing.

For example, instead of asking, “What do you think about Jira automation?” try asking, “What is one repetitive task your team would like to automate?” or “Where has automation created confusion in your workflow?” Clear prompts lower the barrier to contribution and often lead to more practical, honest, and useful responses than a rushed live discussion.

3. Capture topic ideas and requests in Jira

Jira can help turn scattered suggestions into a visible, manageable backlog for the CUG. Create a simple project or board where members can submit topic ideas, questions, demo requests, office-hour needs, or follow-up items from previous conversations.

Keep the workflow lightweight. Statuses like “New,” “Reviewing,” “Planned,” and “Done” may be enough. You can use labels or components to group items by theme, such as Confluence, Jira, automation, governance, reporting, or team practices. This gives members transparency into what has been suggested and helps leaders prioritize programming based on real community interest.

4. Turn live sessions into reusable async resources

A meeting should not be the only place where the value of a CUG session exists. After each session, use Confluence to publish a recap that includes key takeaways, links, unanswered questions, decisions made, and next steps. If recordings are available, link to them alongside a short summary so members can quickly decide what is relevant to them.

Consider adding a “Continue the conversation” section to each recap page. This gives members a place to comment after the session, add examples from their teams, or ask follow-up questions. Over time, these pages become a searchable knowledge base that supports both current members and people who discover the CUG later.

5. Make follow-up actions visible and accountable

Async participation can lose momentum if ideas and questions disappear after they are submitted. Use Jira to track follow-up actions from CUG discussions, such as finding a presenter, gathering examples, answering an open question, creating a template, or scheduling a deeper-dive session.

Visibility builds trust. When members can see that their input is being reviewed, prioritized, and acted on, they are more likely to keep contributing. Even a simple update, such as moving a request to “Planned” or adding a comment with next steps, signals that async participation is meaningful and connected to real outcomes.

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Async participation helps CUGs become more accessible, resilient, and member-driven. By using Confluence as the shared knowledge hub and Jira as the system for organizing ideas and follow-up, leaders can create engagement opportunities that extend well beyond scheduled meetings.

When you provide a clear home base, ask focused questions, manage topic requests transparently, turn sessions into reusable resources, and make follow-up visible, you give members more ways to contribute on their own time. The result is a CUG that stays active between meetings and better reflects the needs, experiences, and voices of the whole community.

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Public Resources You Can Share with Your Group

• Atlassian University – Free Training & Tutorials 

  • Short, product-focused courses that can serve as inspiration for your series topics or pre-work for attendees.

• Work Life by Atlassian – Teamwork & Collaboration Articles 

  • Practical articles on team rituals, facilitation, and collaboration that can inform how you structure your recurring sessions.

• Atlassian Team Playbook 

  • Ready-to-use plays for running retrospectives, health monitors, and other team activities that make excellent recurring series formats.