 So welcome everyone again to the heart of Chicago, where the winds of innovation blow. Now let's learn about a tale of cloud-native, open source, and global communities in tow. So Chicago is known for its pizza. It's so deep and fine. And just like open source, it's a collective design. From the source of ideas to the code that we write in cloud-native's kitchen, it's all done right. And have you ever wondered why the cloud-native projects love the deep-dish pizza so much? Because they both stack layers of cheesy code, of course. And just like the mozzarella that's ooey and gooey, our cloud-native solutions are always so groovy. The Chicago hot dog, it's a culinary delight with the mustard, relish, and that neon green light. And why did the hot dog join the cloud-native spree? To add a no-catch obtained, because that's just not right, you see. And have you ever wondered why the Chicago skyscrapers make such great cloud-native enthusiasts? Because they're experts at high availability and scaling up to new heights. Now, with the global community, together we'll rise. And from Chicago's skyline, we'll aim for the skies. So from the windy shores of Lake Michigan's grays, let's now talk about some of the challenges we face and things that aren't agreed for open source maintainers across the seven seas. From Mumbai's streets to Tokyo's neon glow, South Palo's wives were the KCD's flow, cloud-native and open source. And this global theme, we're growing together and we're chasing a shared dream. Maintainers work around the clock. That's the deal. In time zones worldwide, they're spinning the wheel. Full requests and issues, they keep pouring in. Now, while some are sleeping, others begin. So it's a never-ending cycle, it's a worldwide flow. And in this open source realm, this is how the contributions grow. So shout out to the maintainers across the time divide. You are the backbone of open source. In you, we confide. Time zone challenges, you're gonna conquer them with grace and the cloud-native world, you set the pace. Now, communication's the game in this techie race. And when languages differ, it's like a digital maze. So let's break down the walls and find the solutions we need. And this wonderful community where ideas all feed. Language barriers, we're gonna conquer them with grace. And in this global teams, we're gonna all find our place. Now, why did the cloud-native developer visit the Chicago Bean to reflect on the community? It was quite the scene. From the Field Museum to the Art Institute's Grace, cloud-native enthusiasts with a smile on their face. And Chicago's embrace where art and code convene. Inclusion and accessibility from the Palais painting a joyous scene. With that, welcome me in joining our panelists with an applause. So we've got Divya Mohan from India, who's a Kubernetes 6 docs chair. Divya Mohan from India, who's a Kubernetes 6 docs chair and a CNCF ambassador. You wanna learn more about Wazim's magic and CNCF's allure that she is your compass for sure. Akihiro Suda from Japan, who maintains the container D and runs C core, ensuring that containers run smoothly now and ever more. Carolina Valencia from Brazil, who's a KCD organizer and a leader in the Kubernetes release team. You've got to thank her for continuing to make the project supreme. And finally, Destinio Connor, who's a chair of the CNCF, deaf and hard of hearing working group, who's been phenomenal in making sure it's known that tech is for everyone in every turn. Thank you, everyone. Now let's talk to our panelists. Let's have a seat, everyone. So let's get started. So Carolina, starting with you, you had mentioned that KubeCon has had a tremendous impact in growing local communities in Latin America. That is so inspiring. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. After more Latin members are coming to KubeCon, this inspired to create a lot of new communities in the Latin cities and together with the KCD events. For example, we have in the last six months, we have nine new chapters created. And in total, it's 20 chapters that are active. And this is very inspiring and this year the CNCF help us with the scholarship to the KCD organizers for people that never had the opportunity to come to KubeCon. And for the first time, organizers from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and more, and here with us. And this is great because this is an opportunity to participate in a global event and give back to our local communities. I love that. And also, I love that with KubeCon, you're getting to be such a force multiplier and also inspire so many folks. Destiny. So, CNCFs enabled you to meet deaf and hard of hearing peers and allies from all around the world. So, can you elaborate a little bit on how you got started in the community? Yeah, absolutely. So, I started wanting to meet deaf and hard of hearing. There's a lot of people in the technology space, but I noticed that we faced a lot of challenges and limited access to accommodations. So, during that time, I found CNCF, Deaf of Hard of Hearing Working Group. And really, it's my first time here at KubeCon and my working group members, many of us are here, so that's been great. So, thank you so much for CNCF Scholarship Opportunity to become, and it's been amazing to meet everyone here in person. That's wonderful. Thank you, Destiny. And the working group has also been doing phenomenal work and improving accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing community. So, congratulations on that. Yeah, this is very inspiring. In the KCD Peru, we have members with hard of hearing and speech impediments, and this makes me think, how can we be more supportive and create more awareness in our local communities? Yeah, I agree. Also, changing gears a little bit. We've mentioned a lot about scholarships, so talking about scholarships. Divya, we were recently discussing about the financial struggles of folks getting started in the community. Yeah, so for a lot of folks getting started and open source, despite the scholarships and the support that's offered by various organizations, specifically from India, it's still very much a pipe dream for folks to attend conferences like these. That's because as many of us in the audience can attest, getting visas is hard, and it's super expensive. So, a lot of folks who are actually contributors can't make it, and honestly speaking, I think times are changing with massive conferences like UConn being held in India for the upcoming year in 2024. Yeah, I agree. In Latin also, it's hard to get a visa. Together with the currency exchange, it's very hard to travel to USA and Europe. And that's the reason that we are hoping that we will have a Q-Day Latin that we can bring together all the countries in a big event for all the people that can't travel to USA. I love that idea. I hope that happens. We've got one more exciting announcement to make related to that. So from KubeCon plus CloudNativeCon, based on the community feedback in Paris in 2024, we're now going to announce KubeCon scholarship notifications way in advance, so eight whole weeks prior to the start of the conference date. This will allow for more folks to attend and to help with visa applications. It's truly amazing news, honestly. But I think going back to the financial struggles for a bit, I've also noticed as a dox maintainer that not a lot of folks who get started, specifically early career folks and students who try to get into open source, they don't have access to the right kind of infrastructure in the name of laptops with decent specs. But it's been great to see their resilience as they rise up the contributor ranks and to actually ensure that going forward, future generations of contributors and maintainers are not really impacted by the same set of struggles that they are actually impacted by. So it's been great to see that. Yeah, and in fact, I think I recently saw that India is now the second largest contributor base to Kubernetes in the world. Yeah. So to add to that fun statistic, India along with China and Germany, which are three countries that don't have English as their native language, they feature in the top five contributing countries to the entire CNCF ecosystem. So to be honest, when we are interacting with each other at such conferences or even during your SIG and TAG meetings, it's extremely essential to sort of not use technical jargons or acronyms while having those interactions because newer folks might not really be familiar with that. And I think Akira has some valuable insight in that regard. Yeah. Yes. Japanese people are struggling with this English issue as well. At CUBE Group and other international conferences, it's sometimes difficult to follow along in English when the presentation does not have slides or when the slides do not contain much information. And also my English accent is a challenge when attending conferences or synchronous meetings. Sometimes I even fail to say salutation phrases due to my accent issue. Yeah. To add on to what Akira just said, meetings in general are a really la-muxing problem when it comes to time zones outside the US and EU because it's hard for us to attend meetings and they are typically at a very unfriendly time for a lot of us. And honestly speaking, it leads to a lot of terrible work-life balance issues here. Yeah. Agree. And for the time zone issue, I want to give a special shout out to Davanam Srinivas who is also known as Dimus. He's a maintainer of continuity in the Kubernetes and he always cares about time zone minorities such as me who finds it difficult to attend in synchronous meetings and she always cares about us and tries to make sure that our opinions are reflected through the community. So I want to appreciate Davanam Srinivas, Dimus. Yeah. Communication always is hard for me. Like you can feel shy and hesitate before talk. It's not your natural language. But together with acronyms and idioms, it's hard to understand without a context. So let's try to... I think in general, effective and inclusive communications is difficult in any language. So let's try to have more empathy between each other when we use the synchronous and asynchronous communication. I love that. I love that. I really love that. So I think we need to really remember that in a world full of diverse languages, kindness and empathy eventually end up becoming the universal language of connection. I'm also a huge, huge fan of asynchronous communication. For meetings, closed captioning is one way to tackle the issue. But Destiny, you've called out that that's not enough. Absolutely. Yeah, closed captioning is not enough. We really do need interpreters. Spoken language and closed captions are very different from ASL. It's way more visual. So CNCF has been amazing support and they've provided interpreters here for us today. They've been following us around to various sessions and if you want to interact with us, feel free, please come say hi. If you've never interacted with a deaf person before, we'd be honored to be your first. Thank you so much, Destiny. And I think we need to remember that we need to make tech more inclusive and accessible and also recognize that inclusivity starts at its core. This is also how we can grow community members from all around the world. Definitely. And for growing the international community, I want to note that in Japan, there are still not so many contributors to the collaborative technologies despite the huge numbers of the users. And in Japan, there were five workshops for new contributors to Kubernetes in the last three years. And that helped a lot, but there's still more to do to grow the international contributor community. Yeah, and also improving accessibility will help us draw more senior and experience folks into the community and we desperately need them to sustain the future of our cloud-native projects. So overall, let's reflect on how we can be more inclusive in this community and remember that true progress does not come only when we invite diverse voices to the table, but it comes when we ensure that they get a meaningful seat that helps shape technology that reflects the world that it serves. So thank you, everyone, and here are also some breakout sessions that go into more detail about this topic that I highly recommend checking out. So thanks, everyone, and have a wonderful conference.