 Hi, welcome to the Birds of a Feather discussing user groups at CubeCon in Detroit. I'm Steve Wong. I'm an organizer of Kubernetes Meetup groups in Los Angeles, and I also host another online Kubernetes-related user group. I work for VMware. The goal here is to brainstorm ideas on how we might come out of the pandemic with a strong support system that allows users to make friends, share experiences and best practices while providing feedback to projects and vendors. This is a Birds of a Feather session and I don't know some of you might already be familiar with the concept, but these are a little different than a typical presentation session. I'll just go down a quick summary down the middle. The purpose here is to have a discussion, not to transfer knowledge. The expert here is by no means me. It's you, the audience. Who asked the questions? I'll propose a few to get discussion started and we'll move on from there. The audience role here is to share opinions, experience and feedback. If you'd like, come on up for a more intimate setting and we'll be all talking to one another. I see my role as just facilitating discussion and keeping this on track. The Kubernetes community already supports user groups in some factor and these are found on the Kubernetes community calendar. Most of these groups you see here, it's a busy calendar. Most of them are actually very much dev focused along SIG boundaries, working group boundaries. Theoretically, users are perfectly welcome to join in, but if you were to join in, you'd find they're often very deep dives on specific internal details of the Kubernetes project. If you're an experienced user, you might be able to figure out where you go through the Conway's law of how these are set up, but there's just a handful of them that are divided up as either a labeled user group or a topic that is focused on a particular use case of Kubernetes. The CNCF also has some use case aligned groups like the IoT Edge working group that recently moved over from the Kubernetes upper organization and there is a telecom user group I'm aware of. I think there's one or two more. The CNCF has the portal for labeled end user community. I went and looked at that just this morning and it's geared towards companies that would become sponsors of the CNCF with annual participation programs. You can learn more about it there. It didn't really have direct links to actual operating user groups if you felt you wanted to join one. The reasons I think people join these are not so much to listen to presentations like you find at KubeCon, but also in the sense of local physical meetup groups. It's a place where people engage and make friends, maybe even look for jobs with one another or advertise postings in their local community. That's what it's about. I'll just skip through this. This is another slide I found on the CNCF portal. Kubernetes meetup groups. Pre-COVID, these were very healthy. In Los Angeles, where I come from, the attendance at the monthly Kubernetes meetup group actually reached 250 people, was deemed unmanageably large, and we forked into two groups, east and west side, and each of the two eventually was drawing up to 200 people per month. They died completely during COVID. We haven't had one since. I've been trying to bring one back, but had difficulty recruiting a sponsor to supply a venue. In LA, they used to be held occasionally at Disney, for example, or at AT&T's Direct TV division, which had a big studio space with a lot of capacity. I am aware of some user groups that actually thrived through COVID. The one in Atlanta, the one in London, actually grew membership throughout the pandemic. In fact, I joined those groups myself because somehow they got an interesting pipeline of speakers, but I think we'd like to bring back the formerly thriving physical meetup groups that existed in cities around the world. We want to move on now to the questions. The first one will be, how can we foster and improve local physical meetings where users have a great learning and sharing experience? I'm going to come down off the stage and let's just get together and share some ideas. How about if we just do a few of us? I'll ask. Okay. Yeah. I'm Josh Berkus, Kubernetes contributor, work for Red Hat. I started and theoretically still run the Portland, Oregon Kubernetes user group. What I think theoretically is we've been on hiatus since the start of COVID. Well, maybe we should postpone it. Sure. I'm Zach. I work at VMware building Kubernetes platforms. I actually haven't participated with Kubernetes user groups, but I was part of an organization in college that was all summarized as like a Linux style user group. And I really enjoyed that and haven't quite found the same thing since then. I'm based in San Diego. So my name is Alexis. I work as a developer advocate for Elastic. Before that I was a DevOps engineer and I would say that my introduction into Kubernetes was when I was in DevOps. But since being a developer advocate, I joined a Kubernetes user group in Dallas, Texas. And we haven't met a lot this year, but I'm hoping that that changes. Hi. My name is Rin. I use they them pronouns. I'm from Oakland, California, where I work for Honeycomb, which is observability tooling. I run the open telemetry meetup group right now, which is a fully virtual meetup group, but just came off organizing our essentially second community day type gathering for the open telemetry community, which was a very big lift. So experience doing an in-person thing now, interest in conversations with developer advocates from all over about possibly doing local meetups. But how do we do that? What does that look like really interested in learning from y'all's path into Kubernetes community since y'all are at a little bit later stage and hearing what people are doing? Also, I was one of the founders of women who code on a sort of more personal level. I'm just wondering with your attempts to resurrect the Portland group that what did it look like before what changed and what are the troubles you're having? And do you have any ideas for how you might explore getting it back to where it was? Yeah, well, I'm going to have a question to pass over, right? Because so what happened was it was a fairly strong in-person meetup group with 30, 70 attendees, depending on the meeting. But we rotationally hosted by various businesses in the Portland in downtown Portland area. And even though now we probably have enough members who would be willing to do an in-person meetup, which wasn't true really until recently, no one will host it. So then I would be facing trying to actually rent a venue for hosting, which really ups the budget on a per meetup basis. And we did actually for a while do online stuff at the beginning in 2020, but audiences kind of fell away quickly. I did talk to some places that have had much more successful online meetups, like the folks over in Amsterdam, for example. But the amount of effort they put in their online meetups was way more than I could actually have time for. So one of the things I was interested in is what things have you found to actually have engagement and interactivity in an online meetup? I can talk a little about this. I think we're still working out our quirks. We've only been meeting once a month for a few months now. So one thing I try to do is I program these very specifically to have one person doing hands-on coding and one person doing who has already implemented open telemetry in the particular language. So each meetup is people who are interested in a particular language. So right now we're mostly focused on kubernetes.net because that's where I've had people come out and say, hey, we're implementing open telemetry. And it's almost like those two meetup tracks are a separate community within the meetup. So I think being very specialized helps, I think, not offering formal talks. Like I said, it's live coding with space for people to interject or to say, hey, actually, I don't understand this. Can you back up? As well as sort of a higher level, more functional discussion that captures people. What I would like to work on is having sort of a mandatory discussion segment where people pass the mic around and discuss. And we haven't quite gotten there yet. We're still getting there with the rhythm of the programming and with expectations. And also, people won't stay for more than an hour on an online meetup. So we already have a lot of programming for an hour. Do either of you run online meetups? So I haven't run any online meetups yet. So I've been in my position about three, four months. I've done in-person meetups. What I found out from my team was before during the pandemic, we were focusing on online. But as soon as we made that transition, we didn't necessarily do a good job about having that hybrid model. And so we weren't really getting a good turnout when it came to in-person. And what I've realized is that our pipeline that we have for meetups is getting that speaker that everybody is going to be interested in and sort of having a rinse-and-repeat cycle. But I haven't really heard that, hey, let's do a live coding. And I think that, yeah, I think that's something that I'll consider for the future meetups. Yeah. And I've been running an online user group. It's somewhat odd because Kubernetes a few years ago, when they split the cloud provider plug-ins out of tree, put in place a provision where each cloud provider could try to charter a user group. And they thought that every cloud provider, Amazon, Google would compose one and run one. And as it turned out, only the one I run, which is running Kubernetes on vSphere, got chartered and went into operation. It was okay pre-prandemic. I think at the peak, maybe we had a meeting with 45 people showing up. But interestingly enough, during the pandemic, attendance actually dropped. And I talked to people, and I think it was just this phenomenon called Zoom burnout, where people were spending eight hours of their work day on Zoom with their colleagues, depending on where you work. And the last thing they want is one more Zoom meeting. It just felt painful rather than something that duplicated that experience of close discussions. And an interesting aspect of that is that this same group that has been operating on Zoom, we held a physical meeting at KubeCon in Europe. And obviously not all the membership is even in Europe. But more people showed up to that physically at just an informal meeting we had in a restaurant than we'd been getting at the Zoom meeting. So I think there a signal to me was that there might be people who are missing close interaction with people coming out of this so that these might be even challenging times with Zooms because of that carryover Zoom burnout phenomenon. Right. I'm experiencing both those things as well. Lots of people showed up to the meeting here at KubeCon. People we never met, never were involved in the open telemetry community. And you know, we're having, besides the meetups, we're having an open discussion time in like, we'll have the program meetup on the first week and the open discussion on the third week. And very few people are showing up to open discussion. I feel like people maybe to be convinced to attend one more Zoom event, they needed to have a strong agenda and a strong, I could be wrong about that. And I'm really interested. It sounds like you're experiencing the same. So yeah, in my experience with in-person meetups is that if I didn't have a primary topic for the meetup that turnout would be non-existent. So one of the, like I said, one of the other problems, the other reason why I think we lost the online meetup audience, at least in Portland was, you know, both for Kubernetes and for the DevOps meetup where there's a lot of crossover between the two particular meetups. The, one of the main reasons for people attending was for hiring, right? Is either people were looking for jobs or people were looking to hire other people. It was a big part. But every meetup, we would start out with hiring announcements. And that didn't really port to the online format. We actually tried to get employers to participate and that just really did not work. And I think without, I think that was a really important part of the in-person experience. I totally agree on that hiring aspect because in LA, more times than not, the host of the venue was in a position where they were trying to hire. So they put recruiting tables at that event. They weren't necessarily an IT vendor at all. They just wanted to use the meetup as an opportunity to do hiring. And there's some of that where, you know, maybe the tech industry is at a downturn. And I can see where maybe those companies that would sponsor something physically wouldn't get the same value out of online because they'd see they'd already had an online recruiting presence anyway. I'll throw out a few things because I talked to people, I was trying to recruit people to this session downstairs. And some of them gave me some ideas, but were unable to be here. So Lisa Namphee at Cockroach Labs told me that she had successfully put on an online meetup recently in San Francisco and managed, it was only because she got some company willing to take on the COVID related obligations, you know, in California where I live, you have to register people, check VAX cards, and even potentially have a mechanism of tracking reporting afterward. And a lot of company legal departments will nix it currently. I'm hoping that goes away, but that's a big part, I think, of reluctance on the part of volunteers to host venues. But she said that once she got it, the attendance was just excellent and the participation was excellent. I also heard from somebody who had a return to physical meeting in Amsterdam and they weren't sure what to expect, declared it, and 450 people showed up. And it was so big that they couldn't possibly fit them and they just took over every bar and restaurant within a four block vicinity. But people just kind of missed that social interaction. So maybe we can aspire to sort of the world coming back if we just wait it out. Let me go back. I was going to say, even with us like waiting to like and hoping that the world will return to normal and that people would get that comfortability again, how do we measure success now? You know, I think that's one of the things that I sort of think about because it's already a little, yeah, it's already a little shaky to try and measure that success. But then, you know, yeah, how would we how do we get to that point even now? I had three questions. I don't even know if we'll get to them all. But the next one was going to be how we divide up because this is really about user groups. And we've got user groups like the meetup ones are typically just generic Kubernetes and awfully broad topic. Yet some of these zoom ones that are operating tend to be more focused on use case niches such as machine learning or I actually have a zoom on IoT edge. I know there are some on telecom, on financial, on retail. And a few of us here represent particular projects or products. And I'm wondering if what people's thoughts are on the best way to do these both, you know, maybe it would be best the physicals were wide open, because you could recruit speakers on a broad swath of topics. Maybe if you're going to continue to have zoom, more did niche things are better online because you collect from worldwide audience. But I'm open for thoughts. Well, this actually goes into I'm going to actually address two questions at one because he asked this question about measuring success. And so one of my difficulties with a lot of stuff like the online meetups and that sort of thing is that part of my goal in creating a meetup is to actually create a community, which yeah, to actually create a community of people who, you know, regularly dial into the meetup or regularly attend the physical meetup, you know, you know, welcome newcomers have some of their, you know, stuff that they own, that they do interact with each other, you know, in some social fashion, etc. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why a lot of these pursuing sort of worldwide meetups, you know, basically topical meetups, right? So you pick a topic and you're not particularly geographically that hasn't been that appealing because I haven't seen a way to sort of build that kind of community identity. I know people are trying. For example, we had here at this coupon, the data and Kubernetes community. And I know that they're trying, but I also know that they're also finding it really hard. Yeah, we have tried to build up a Slack channel around the meetups. And it's, it's hard. Like, we have to do a lot of cultivating of that channel. And like trying like, Oh, yeah, here's a question for this week, trying to bring you together like a lot of basic grooming. And I don't know, honestly, in the end, how strong the urge for all of those folks to connect is. I think that is why we're trying to narrow the use case for the online ones. For the offline ones, to be perfectly honest, I know that before the pandemic, there were cloud native meetups in particular cities. And I would really love to team up with a group that is doing a cloud native meetup in a few large cities, preferably ones where we already have the presence of a developer advocate or a company that's really involved in open telemetry and say, Hey, we'd like to provide quarterly meetups for you on this topic or whatever and not try to run my own meetup exclusively on open telemetry because I just think it's still too small of a topic. I think that's a really interesting model. Because I feel like I'm based in San Diego and I don't know that I would go to an open telemetry meetup weekly or even monthly in San Diego, but I might show up to something quarterly and in the other 12 weeks of the quarter, if there were other kind of niche topics, I wouldn't show up every week, but I would pick and choose the ones that were interesting to me. And instead of having that balance of broad, like over the span of the community, it's kind of broad, but on any given week, you bring together people to talk about a specific topic. I think that helps with sort of what Josh was saying about community, like you see sort of the same people coming and it may not be the same people every single week, but you get different subsets of the people each week to have a focused conversation about something. And for me, that's more interesting than just kind of like general, like, oh, let's get together and talk about cloud native. That's too big to get excited. Anyone who wants to talk about cloud native generally is probably doing something. Yeah, one thing, this was Lisa's idea too. She dropped this Easter egg on me when she couldn't be here, but she said to make sure to remind people running local meetup groups that there's a big payoff in cross promoting. If you're in a big area that is running meetups on specialized topic as well as general, nobody ever turns down, in her experience or mine, the opportunity to send out the meeting notice to their mailing list. And it's just like your situation where you might subscribe to only one meetup group, but not even be aware there's two or three others. And the cross promotion is sort of a win-win for any group organizer and brings the broader geo community together more often. Now, I guess we'll have to delegate this out. But my third question that I put on, and I'm open to any other people putting questions on the table, was what should we ask the CNCF to do to support these groups operating now? Or maybe even perspective? Yeah, so I don't have an example of this from the, say, technology community. But for another community I'm involved in, you know, there's like a local meetup group in San Diego and, you know, in a typical event we get, I don't know, five to ten people from that community. And it's a topic of sort of broader interest. And so one of the sort of key notable people in the broader community did a, I'll call it like a mini road show where they said they'll attend the meetup in this city on this week and the meetup in this other city on another week and, you know, planned a, you know, like a couple of months long trip around. And we saw, I mean, somewhere between 50 and 100 people show up just because this author was in town and we all came out. And in the couple of weeks following that we saw much higher attendance. And it sort of trailed off, but we ended up sort of higher than we were before at a study state. And so about a year later the same thing happened. And again, it sort of like helps to kind of reinvigorate the community. And so getting back to this topic, having CNCF or specific projects help to bring notable people that everybody wants to hear from to some of these larger, you know, geographic areas and sort of have a special guest at a meetup to sort of give it in person talk about a book they wrote or a podcast they run or some sort of community they're involved in. I think that could get people excited and out who might not show up otherwise and have them meet people in the community and want to come back next time. Yeah, this has been tricky. I feel like we do have a lot of support within our project because we are the only meetup group happening for the project. And I'm working on it with two or three people. So while it can be stressful, like no sense of burnout, at the same time, we don't. And this is a project wide problem and not a problem specific to open telemetry meetups. We don't understand what resources are there from the CNCF and how to access them. And my efforts to try to reach out have gone completely nowhere, either through service desk or through going into different Slack channels for meetup organizing the thing. Hey, is anyone interested in teaming up? We've got this great virtual meetup and content available. And I see some of you are having virtual meetups, but I don't know how to connect with those people. And I've even tried sending them individual messages on meetup.com and stuff. And it's just all crickets. And it would be great if there was someone at the CNCF who could actually connect us with some of these groups and some of these resources, like this site that they supposedly have for meetup organizers. Okay, I'll talk to you a bit afterward, but I'll throw out the name Taylor and give you his link. Obviously something isn't working as well as it could, but it isn't that there's total crickets there. Yeah, I mean, this doesn't have anything with cross-pollination. Currently, statutorily, the support that the CNCF have is the Bevy platform. And that's the only current official support for meetups. There was some money, but that was really focused on in-person meetups. And they haven't figured out how that relates to other kinds. That has nothing to do with doing cross-pollination. That's people. And I think part of the reason why you're getting crickets, actually, is that so many of the meetup organizers currently are still, you know, my in-person meetup is still on hiatus. So, Josh, I hate to put you on the spot, but I'll do it anyway. So maybe I don't hate it so much, but I know that you're one of the organizers of the scale conference and it got aligned with, you know, some sort of Kubernetes, what do they call it, community days or something. It isn't a meetup per se, but it is a physical conference. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about what's involved there? Well, so one of the things is they have the whole KCD program, which is smaller regional conferences that are getting put on. And for regionally-based meetups, it makes sense to link that up, but we're having the weird thing right now, right, is obviously the LA meetup has been on hiatus for however long. And so also one of the other problems that we had with the CNCF that the meetups went through is COVID hit right when we were moving off of meetup.com and Antebevi, because meetup.com had been bought by the workspace company and had always honestly been mismanaged, but the mismanagement had gotten much worse. But a lot of these KCDs are going forward and they may be, for a lot of the regional meetups, a really good way to actually revive this, right? So like when we have KCDLA, part of it should be talking about, hey, so for those of you who are local, let's talk about the meetup and that could work for regional meetups. It could also work for topical meetups because there are topical events, right? Like for example, we had a bunch of colos here. How much promotion of topical meetups was there at any of those colos? When it comes to the virtual meetup groups that you all have been having, have you only been targeting sort of like the United States or have you been targeting outside of the United States and has your approach changed based on what region or sort of like what country that you're like looking into to pull for audience? Yeah. I can't answer this. We're still relatively small. We have been targeting doing the main live meetup in a time convenient for most US and EU people. It falls at six o'clock EU, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. East Coast, that whole time zone. We are currently working with meetup hosts in Europe and Australia who are hosting the like unprogrammed conversations. So there's three of those, which is one reason our attendance is low, frankly, because we're splitting the audience across three. And the hope is to get the programmed meetups online for, with those hosts, so they, so people can rewatch the programming but not, and it's just we don't have enough organizers to have programmed meetups in three different time zones. So that's how we're approaching it at the moment. In the past when I've worked at Mozilla and some other places, I have had to deal with sort of figuring out how to work cross-culturally. For example, there the Indian community is really like a lot of contributors to Mozilla live in India. And so it's been a process of like enabling people differently based on where they're based and doing a lot of listening. And ideally you have an employee of your company who is aware of the culture and can help you with some connections and introductions. That'd be my strongest advice is get somebody engaged who understands that culture and can make some introductions for you. So I have been running online Zoom meetups that straddle really the, I think the membership is very much geo-distributed. I can tell you more things not to do than things to do. One of these groups we tried having multiple times. We only tried two, not three that you alluded to. But it turned out to be somewhat of a problem because people couldn't remember. We declared that every two weeks we'd flip and we had one that was geared towards North America, one for Asia, China and polar opposite times really. But people ended up showing up on the Zoom. If you own the Zoom group ownership credentials, you'd see these things like three people joined the Zoom and they're at the wrong time zone one. And I always thought it was perfectly well marked, but it becomes an issue trying to do the logistics. Then speakers see that you have two slots. Sometimes the speaker would show up at the wrong time. Or the speakers, when they saw two were available, you had a tough time getting fills in the off one. In retrospect, we ended up killing one and going back to a single occurrence at always at the same time. But even that, the lingering people who added in their calendar lasted for over a year. And shifting your meeting time around, in my experience, is problematic. That people just want to get in that pattern. And they're like many of them are working at a place that have recurring meetings. So it dropped into that particular slot on the calendar for them. And they can defend that if they're interested in the topic. But if it moves around, it's much tougher to remember and join. And it's much tougher to not have conflicts come in your workspace if it varies from one cycle to the other. Now, theoretically, if you go look at the charter details that are in the Kubernetes project too, you are not supposed to unilaterally declare one as, say, the group chair or lead. You're supposed to put it out to a membership vote. Now, when you pick a new time, that's tough because maybe only the people who find the current time convenient are there to vote. So I've always put the voting out on the Slack channel where it's a little more asynchronous. But actually having group membership pick the time in the day is probably a really good idea. But it's going to be a compromise. So maybe you do that, some of those online polls, let you have rankings and things that maybe can allow you for a compromise of people who have a second, third, and first choice. Okay, I think we're at or past time anyway. So thank everybody for coming. I thought it was a good conversation even though we experienced the typical issue of late in the day slot on the last day. And thanks again. Thank you for your time.