 Welcome, folks, and thank you for joining this discussion session about lessons learned running Kubernetes community days across Europe. I'm Matt Jarvis. I'm director of developer relations at a company called Snake, and I am one of the organisers of Kubernetes community days UK. And I'm joined today by my awesome panel who I'm going to ask to introduce themselves very quickly starting with Alessandro. Hi, I'm Alessandro. I live in Amsterdam and run the Dutch Kubernetes Meetup with awesome people. And we did Kubernetes community days in Amsterdam in February, just a month ago, and it was a great success. Hello, my name is Annalisa Gennaro. I'm active for the KCDE Italy in the cartographers group as well, and I'm newly appointed, fresh appointed ambassador. Hi, I'm Max Carbecha. I'm from Germany. I'm running the KCDE Munich and organised also this in the beginning of this year, the KCDE Ukraine as a fundraising event. And beside that, I do also some meet up. Thank you. Hi, I'm Paula Kennedy. I co-organise KCDE UK and we just opened our CFP on Monday. So if you'd like to talk at KCDE UK later this year, you should apply now. I see what you did there. Nicely done. Nicely done. Thank you all, folks. I'll come back to you in a second. But I wanted to start by giving a very quick overview of what Kubernetes community days are for those who may not know. So KCDEs are community events organised by local community folks for the community, but kind of under the umbrella of the CNCF. So there's lots of help there from the CNCF that we'll talk about later. But they're a way of really growing the kind of local cloud native community in your region. And events typically, you know, emphasise the local kind of flavour and region and culture. So you can see some of the stats there from the overall programme success, which are some awesome numbers. 63 events in total, 16,000 plus attendees. And these have happened from all over the world. I did have a lovely slide with the world map on it, but it won't display properly. So we'll skip over that one for today. But in stats of 2022, 18 KCDEs and across 15 countries. So it's been a really super successful programme. Has anybody in the room been to a Kubernetes community day? Awesome. Thank you for all your support. Anybody organised one? Oh, brilliant. So round of applause for all the folks who've helped organise these. Thank you very much. OK, so let's kick things off and get into some of the challenges of organising these events. So putting together the right set of folks is super important for a successful event. What insights can you folks on the panel share about the sort of people who in an ideal world you should have involved? Sort of the mix of skills and things like that. So I'm going to kick this off with asking Max what are your thoughts on this one? Yeah, sure. So I think for the team you really early need to think about a good mixture of people. You definitely need some more for marketing. Also when you're like maybe tech by heart. But you really need someone who can do the outreach, who attract the people for the event. Just popping up somewhere, it's not bringing you anyone. In our case we had luck that we also had someone who knew already how to organise partially events and has a feeling for the prices for drinks and stuff like this. Because honestly out there when you organise something the most of the people wants to make money also out of you. But when you try to make a community event you have a limited budget. So it's good if you know already maybe this drinks is too much or this food is too much. So this helps very much to have some people who can help you from their experience. They don't need to be professional event organisers but they need to have a feeling for it. And then obviously you also need to have somehow a good connection to the community. To find the first speakers who can bring in where you can discuss about. It becomes speakers also a little bit later. And yeah this general mixture in the beginning is very very important to have a good kick off. Paula, do you want to add anything to that one? I'd say it's important to have quite a big team if you can. Because for us I mean we all do it as our hobby kind of voluntary. It's not our day job. And so if you only have a small number of people it means there's a lot of work for a small group. If you've got a bigger team at least you can split responsibilities, you can share tasks. And if someone has a really busy time at work someone else can pick up the load. And I think that's quite helpful. Alessandro or Annalisa anything you want to add around people? Not really but I agree with Paula. Now we are 14, about 14 people for KCD Italy and we organized in two different teams. One marketing team and the other technical. And we meet up once a week all as far as marketing is concerned. And every two weeks we all organize us. And that makes it easier to take tasks on and to back up other people workloads. You really just need enthusiasm that you must have it before you join. And great if you don't have it you're going to learn it quite fast. How many out of interest how many folks were in each of the organizing teams for these events? I know Annalisa you've said it was 14. More or less yeah. UK I think we've got nine all together. We were around six to nine dish. We had a core team people that all year long organized that and then we have volunteers on site. So some people they decided they wanted to be there. A little bit later hopefully if we get if we get timed. OK, so that's awesome. Thank you for your insights there. So the next kind of big, big thing here and probably one of the big elephants in the room. I think when you talk about putting community events on is that putting on events is not cheap. Even a small event has fairly significant cost to it. So the next kind of starting point for discussion is around money. And I'm kind of thinking here you know if you're happy to share how much the event cost please please do. I think it's an interesting interesting thing for people to understand. And you know how do you how do you raise the money? So I'll start off with with Annalisa. Yeah, case the Italy this year will be for the first time in person. So we are talking about in person events and about it would cost about 70 80,000 euros for 250 people around sponsorship is crucial. Let's say vital without sponsors. Just no event because it's very unlikely you will cover the cost with the ticket sale. So before that I would make a step, take a step back, step back and talking about need of the fiscal sponsor or fiscal entity. Because as you know you have to put money in advance and you have to find someone who can do that. In our case we decided for a third party agency who help us on the fiscal administrative sites and on the logistics as well. In that way we have no big problems with cash flow and invoising. So you need a fiscal sponsor to take payments and make payments in advance before sponsors are identified and found. One set that you have to produce a prospect which is not as easy at its sounds because you have to find appealing perks. And it's not that easy because you have to set boundaries, clear boundaries as well with companies saying and repeating that case the events are community driven community oriented events. Organised volunteers and with no profit goals. This is not a very easy to convey message. Sponsors want something back. They want leads, they want brand visibility seems not to be enough for them. So it's always a negotiation with them. It's a struggle somehow. Sorry I've got notes because it's my first time. I have to look at them. We don't understand the reasons why it's so difficult to find sponsors. Sometimes probably it's a question of higher sea levels that do not feel the community might be. There was the post pandemics time that caused problems. This year is the layoffs time. It's never the correct time for asking money. Budget is always allocated whether it's January, February, June. It's very difficult to solve that problem. So that is our experience. We are lucky because we organise, I have five companies that back us up. So we managed to put some money in advance easier. But again we have to cover 8,000 euros cost. So it would be a battle. So Alessandro do you want to give your thoughts on this? We share all the financials. It's important to be transparent. We can share with all of you all the costs and the incomes. It cost 180,000 euros which is more money than I've ever seen in my life. It was a bit scary but we covered it. We made 5,000 euros which is a lot including all the donations we made. You're not giving up the day job though right? No, I don't think so. It is scary but you can pull it off. So a bit of planning, a bit of... Well, don't think too much. Luck is true, true luck but it's also hard work. So we and all the organisers they went on and they pinged a lot of people. Be prepared to get a lot of nos. So that's okay. That helps you build character. You have to keep going. Eventually things will go well. We are happy that thanks to the amazing team we put it off. Thank you. Max, Paul or anything you want to add that we haven't covered there already? Obviously you will need a lot of time to find sponsors. Our first KCD Munich was on a very short notice just like six months from the first idea till we hold it. So this was like every day running around and like hey, do you have something for us? This is a great event first time. Do you want to comment so on so forth? So we had obviously a lot of time of struggle to find money. We thought it was a bit easier. For the second time now we have like not almost a year but like nine to ten months in preparation it's way more relaxed. So take this time. Don't rush. Maybe because one month is like the perfect month where you want to hold the KCD in your area. It's maybe a good idea but you will have very hard time. So give yourself the time so you can also find the sponsors. Just to add on to what Annalisa said as well. The thing that's helped us is having the organising team a number of people and then all of those organising team companies being able to put money in helps you get started because it is one of the challenges I think is the cash flow where you have to pay for certain things up front. You have to pay for the venue. You have to pay for catering. You might have to pay for certain things before sponsors have paid. And one tip I would recommend is it seems like the bigger the company the slower they are to pay. So if you are worried about cash flow you might want to... We're naming no names here though. We're naming no names. No naming and shaming. But the bigger they are the slower they are to pay in my experience. So going with slightly smaller companies, scale up startups and have a bit of cash that they can pay quickly might be better for cash flow. Okay, folks, I'm going to have to move you on on this one because otherwise we're not going to have enough time but we can come back at the end if there's more questions about money. So you've raised the money. Now the second most important thing I think is probably about the content and this is another super important topic. Speakers are clearly the lifeblood of any event and why your audience is going to be turning up. So what are the challenges around managing the call for papers and getting speakers? I'm going to start with Paula on this one. So call for papers I think is the starting point for us. So open it and then publicise it and keep publicising it and keep publicising it. And you do find that with an open CFP you'll get 90% of the submissions in the last three days or something. It's always people leave it to the last minute and then you'll get a whole lot but it's really, really worth just continuously advertising it. I think the risk with CFPs is a lot of people will, you'll see a lot of the same faces will apply in the same kind of like community. And so one thing that we really tried to do with our KCDUK was also to do direct outreach to people that might not have actually wanted to apply or thought about applying, but we wanted them to come and speak. And so we had a sort of a list of people that we really wanted to invite. And then our third action that we took was to actually try to go to local groups in the UK that support underrepresented communities to try to get more diverse voices in the room. So we actually approached different groups, different meet-up groups and asked them if they would put forward speakers so that we could make sure that we didn't have a line-up of folks that all look the same. Yep, Annalisa, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, we had the same experience as Paula just said, always the same faces, always the same voices, which is fine. But again, it would be nice to have more diverse and new people on stage. We had big problems, real troubles in engaging diverse speakers. We tried every possible channel, even outside CNCF. We reached out to women in tech, sheet tech groups that are meant to voice diversity. We reached, we contacted directly individuals that were suggested by CNCF contacts, but probably there are so few speakers available, are so few that they are overwhelmed, overloaded by requests, so probably they can't take part to any CNCF event at higher or lower levels. But I want you to tell a personal story that happened to me last year. I'm very new to the CNCF community. I started just last year and to the industry as well. It was the first marketing meeting or something like that, and a person asked me to take part to talk as a cost speaker for the CNCFP of Valencia. At first I was incredibly flattered, but I was new, newbie. I'm not a non-tech person, so I was rather surprised. And when I asked the reasons why, this person replied, well, the CNCF wants and likes people as cost speakers. They want to hear more female voices on stage. So this person didn't choose me for what I am and what I could give. I was just passed by in front of his eyes and he asked me to get on the bus. So I'm not sure this is what we really want. So I think it's a very delicate topic, very difficult. I have no solution at all. I can tell you that for KCD Italy, the marketing team is made up of five women and one man. Oh, ciao, Marcello. Yeah, he is. Sorry I didn't say it. And we, nevertheless, we find very difficult to solve this issue. But again, we don't want to have women just because they are women. So it will take time probably to find a way out. Alessandro, Max, you want to add anything too? Oh, to the personal study, thank you for sharing. Well, as an organizer, as a team of organizers, you really have a chance to set the stage for your conference. So it is the most important job that you can do, making the program, curate the program. Don't publish the agenda before you check for diversity. Don't do the mistake. But yeah, it's your responsibility to choose well because everything comes from there. The happiness of the people attending their satisfaction comes from the quality of the talks. So, yeah. Max, anything you want to... I think everything is said on that. It's complicated to get it right. But I also need to say it's not only the guidelines which we need to put in place as good as possible. But it's also like meanwhile, company sponsors asking for like, hey, how is your ratio? How is your diversity ratio? If you cannot provide this, I take my money back. I take my speakers back and you can do the same by yourself. So there's also like meanwhile other pressures coming in, which is good on the one hand side to be honest. But then it's also like the other way. Like what are you doing to bring us this diversity? How do you as a sponsor bring this diversity to us? Because in the end, we are just sitting there and like we are begging for people who wants to speak. We are begging for money and like asking like, hey, let's come together, join us. But it's like someone needs also on other places to enforce this and enable this. Thank you, folks. I mean, I think the reality of that is and I think this is the message that's coming across from everyone's comments there is that you're very unlikely to achieve a diverse line up just from putting a CFP out there, right? And I think it's important for people to understand that point. Okay, so we've got some money. We've got some content. This you think is Amsterdam, right? Looks fantastic. I'm sorry I couldn't be there now. So the final big piece of the puzzle is the place. So what do we need to think about when we think about finding the right venue? So Alessandro, it looks like you had a great venue. We had a great venue, yes. Expensive, but great. No, it's important. The venue has to have a soul, right? So we didn't like, that's what I mean by you set the stage, right? So if you choose one of these corporate offices, then your conference is going to be a corporate thing. And this was instead like an old sugar factory or transformate electricity station. And it was also a club that came in handy when we did the after party in the club. So it was more cosy than very, very precise. So let's set the stage for the old conference. Yeah, awesome. Max, what's the other? Yeah, so in our case in the first KCD was actually quite funny because we searched for the right size. So it was like, you always have the problem of the combination. How many speakers do I want to have? Is it one track? Is it two track? Is it one day? Is it two days? So it's like you start first puzzling around and then you need to find one of the venues in your city or in the area where you are, which is sometimes getting very difficult. And then you start asking for like, hi, how much does it cost? So then you get another variable into this one and that's getting even more crazy. So we ended up actually was a location last year which we did not entirely liked. It was a little bit too much cosy for us. We imagined a little bit more space and more possibilities for the attendees. But we received a lot of positive feedback in the end because we like give time to for the people to move from left to right. We give enough time to talk to each other. We had for example the problem that we serve the food and the drinks in the same room where we also had one track. So what we did like, okay, we took the first and the last track out so that when we bring in food and when we start serving the food there is no talk going on and no one is getting disturbed by it. So you can make, even when you have maybe something in your magnation, it looks like, wow, very big venue, everything is cool, tons of stuff, you don't get it there. You can still make it very cool and especially when you can give the time for the people to come around and they can adapt to it and feel more comfortable in it. I can see you thinking there for all that. No, I was just thinking back to the fact that for us we did KCDU UK and the first one was virtual so we didn't have to worry about a venue and then the second one when we came to start planning it the fun thing in our committee is that we have representatives from different parts of the UK so we have certainly England, Wales, Scotland I'm not sure if we've got anyone in Northern Ireland but anyway, so then when it came to choosing a location before we even chose the venue there was a lot of anti-London sentiment let's just put it that way people were like, why are we going to London? But we did go to London the easiest place for people to get to so I'd say that was a particular challenge for us but in terms of choosing a venue accessibility is really important it's like a number one thing if your venue is not wheelchair accessible that should be out instantly and we went for quite a central location we liked our venue it was a code node in London it's kind of a community hub space anyway so it was perfect for our size perfect for the breakout spaces and centrally located and went very well so we're going back to the same place this year What about some of the challenges around whether the venue can accessibility can mean a lot of things what about the dietary requirement bit and things like that that can be quite challenging in terms of catering Annalisa, did you have to think about things like that when you're picking venues and catering for the rest of it? No, really No, sorry, I was thinking about it but we delegated that issue to the agency I talked about so we just told them be careful about all possible scenarios that you can encounter and they handled that with Yeah, I will tell you I will answer this question in July after we will have the case later I have no idea so we are anxious and curious about Annalisa, you were all vegan, right? Yes, because it just makes it simple Yes, how many vegans are in the room? Yes, you said in the word so we could make a choice and we did and we said, okay for two days you can be vegan and it's alright, you're not gonna die we even have vegan barbecue we had fun and it was great food actually pineapple pizza is vegan so next year totally so we asked them can you work with us on this that was our strategy, our direction they worked with us, it was delicious I couldn't stop eating vegan burgers I'm not vegan myself but then we were on the news there is a movement of vegan leaders they wanted to interview us you can actually be the change you want to see in the world it's real, you can do something about it Great stuff Right, so I'm gonna kind of speed up a little bit because I do want to leave some time at the end for questions if folks have them but we're kind of on now to how do we actually get people there how do we promote and sell the tickets and I'm gonna ask this one to Annalisa I think Yeah Well, first of all thank you to Audra and Katie for all the efforts because you can find a detailed plan for marketing and promotion activities on the CNCF repo so just start from there you have to start months earlier once you choose the venue, you found the venue, just start with your promotion activities as for Kissed Italy we invested from the beginning in storytelling so we created a logo we invested on a logo because we had a story to tell and we have been doing that for the three years and we open official accounts, social accounts we have a Twitter and LinkedIn accounts we have a social posting plan and we try to be active all year long of course not only during and before the event but we ask for advocacy we ask for advocacy to all organisers with their personal and corporate accounts the CNCF accounts our support but we ask our media partners as well to be very vocal our sponsors of course we are trying them and we try to get out the CNCF community as well to attract more people from other communities so we promote on select channels on telegram channels wherever we are active outside the CNCF so that people can even know about it because we need to attract more talent on that side too and what I find very important in these terms is the collaboration with our KCD I find that it's very important to create a fabric within the KCD groups among the KCD groups for example we had a great help from KCD France and KCD Amsterdam on giving details and that is very helpful because you are talking with people that are struggling like you they understand your pain points they can find alternative solutions that you haven't think of so that could be something we could work on more in future for example trying to find a shared calendar of KCD events we were talking before this panel with Czech and Slovak KCD years it's difficult we are competing somehow Europe is a very small territory so we have to distribute KCD events better over the year and maybe to work together on the sponsorship quest collaborate on that side too that's my experience our experience as KCD Italy Paula do you want to have you got any thoughts on this topic I mean I think Annalisa is correct the amount of time it takes to promote to get people to sign up one thing that we did last year we were lucky that we had raised enough sponsorship to cover our costs and so what we tried to then do was to give more tickets away so one thing on the topic specifically of tickets one thing is to try to not price them too highly because you want community folks to come the whole point is to bring in the community so you don't want to over price the tickets and then if you can we gave some to students we gave some to again underrepresented groups we then put out a tweet that said folks who had been recently laid off could just apply for tickets you didn't need to provide proof just ask us and we'll give you a ticket just trying to get more of the community involved more people to actually be able to attend our event I think that's a good point isn't it that one way of thinking about the costing of events and I think this is where we went is that if you really cost the event on the basis of the sponsorship covering the costs then it allows you to be a lot more flexible in terms of ticket allocation and you know there's always going to be people who you would like to have at those events students, folks who can't afford the ticket price etc so if you can start from the perspective of the sponsorship actually covering the cost of the event it gives you that flexibility anyone else want to add anything on the the sort of tickets and promotion part? Yeah what we did we split the ticket so we have a two day event and now you can buy an early bird ticket this is closed sorry you can get the two day access but you can also get one access for the Monday and one ticket for the Tuesday because we have seen that some people have just too much meetings asking for a where I can sit in a meeting room we don't have a meeting room for you so this helped and it helped this year also like already for the early bird sales a lot of people like just purchases already and then if you organize something do not panic if like two weeks before the event happen you just have sold 60% of the tickets that's good because the other 40% comes in the next few hours and then it's like your inbox is basically getting spammed by people who are like start buying the tickets and you also see this little spike after you've announced to speakers for example Thanks for your sharing So this is a good thing there Okay folks well I think we've only got a couple of minutes left so I think we're going to just skip the last bit that we were going to talk about stuff on the day because we do want to put up here a bunch of resources that if you're interested in running a KCDE of your own that you can go and check out so there's fantastic resources from the CNCF in the the Kubernetes community days repo obviously you can come and reach out to to any of the organizers of KCDEs all over the world we're more than happy to share our experiences Katie is in the audience here you won't be able to miss her in the pink so just in the last couple of minutes do we have any questions from the from the audience I'm going to go to the gentleman in the middle there I know you had your hand up earlier Hang on one second if you could wait for the microphone that would be great because it's been recorded He's Italian too I'm not I'm not I have a question and a remark for the Italian KCDE I noticed that the CFP was extremely short in the time frame to submit papers so I wonder how do you plan to get reach for community with such a short CFP how short how should a CFP time be from what I understood the KCDE Italy is in July and the CFP was open I think in February and closed in March or something like that I don't remember exactly but it was open for 2-3 months Marcello Paolo, yeah I thought it was shorter but okay maybe I'm wrong Should it be longer? I think considering that that you want the reach of the local community so I say the remark and then I maybe makes more sense I think that the Kubernetes community is an event that is promoting the local community or reaching out to the local community so the local community should have a strong say or a strong chance to get there as attendees and speakers whereas what I see also in the KCDE is that there was a lot enterprise that was global rather than local whereas the like ING talks or bank stocks where the places that everybody wanted to be to listen what are those guys doing so I think the KCDE organisers should actually actively reach out to the local enterprises to say bring in speakers and especially diverse speakers and then afterwards let me say something I see the ambassadors looking at each other like I might be wrong and as I said I'm really new so this is just what I feel and what my opinion is but I think it depends on how big your local community is too Anna-Lisa I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap it up there we've literally run out trying I'm so sorry folks for those of you who had questions we will hang around afterwards out in the hallway and you can grab the panel there thank you very much for listening thank you to everybody who commits their time to organising Kubernetes community days and thank you to the fabulous panel