 Hello, wonderful viewers. Welcome to CubeWatch, your insider look at KubeCon Cloud NativeCon. I'm Katie Greenlee, and I'm super excited to be here with all of you today. Thank you for joining us. Today's live stream is all about Cloud Native Hacks. We'll dive into this hackathon and how you can participate in challenges the United Nation has provided. I can't wait to share some exciting, exclusive insights and how you can make this program part of your KubeCon Cloud NativeCon experience. I would like to take a moment and welcome our guest, Arun Gupta, Matusa Kajendraan, and Daniel Crook. Sorry, Matusa, I said that wrong. Who are experts on the Cloud Native Hacks, and we'll be sharing their knowledge with all of you on how you can get involved and take advantage of this experience. A few housekeeping items before we get started. During the live stream, you are not able to talk as an attendee. There is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to drop your questions in there, and we'll get to as many as possible at the end. This is an official live stream of the CNCF, and as such, it is subject to the CNCF Code of Conduct. Please do not add anything to the chat or questions that would be in violation of that Code of Conduct. Basically, please be respectful of all your fellow participants and presenters. Let's get this started with Arun. Can you give us a brief overview of the hackathon goals and themes? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm very happy to be here. I'm very excited about this hackathon. I've been involved with CNCF for a fairly long time, been on the governing board for over six years, and now as a chair, this is my third running year as a chair. This is the first time KubeCon CNCF together, we are doing this hackathon. And if you think about it, that captures the essence of what developers want to do. They want to create cool things, they want to show off their talents, and they want to be able to solve tough problems. And that's the essence and the genesis of this hackathon. If you think about, I'm super happy to be here, that Mithusa is going to talk about UN SDGs, but United Nations created these sustainable development goals at the beginning of the millennium. They were called as MDGs to begin with Millennium Development Goals, and now they're sustainable development goals. And if you think about it, these MDGs, sorry, SDGs now actually are all about poverty, reduce poverty, reduce hunger, reduce crime, be preventive action, what can we do around that? Gender equality, racial equality, all of those things. And so that's really the basis of it, really combining that SDG concept, how do we make the world a more sustainable place? And then how do we capture that builder spirit of the KubeCon attendees, combine those two together? So this is basically a three-day in-person hackathon as part of KubeCon Paris. The hackathon by itself starts on 19th, runs on 19th, 20th, and 21st, three-day hackathon. So lots of opportunities to mingle with your co-hackers. What we are requesting is for people, well, United Nations, and Mitru Sir will talk about that, but UN has really submitted a whole bunch of challenges that they've collected from their partners, which are real-world challenges. So what we are requesting people is, go to the Cloud Native Hacks website, and I'm sure we can drop a link in the chat. Go to the Cloud Native Hacks website, take a look at those challenges. So that's one set of challenges that you can look at. Or if you think there is a better angle, there is a better problem that you wanna solve in your local community, bring those challenges out, as long as they're aligned with the SGGs, submit that. So bring a team together, form a team together, talk to your fellow Cloud Native hackers, create a team, think about what challenge you wanna solve, either a proposed one or a new one, and submit a team. So you essentially hack during the hackathon, which is March 19th through 21st, and we're gonna announce the winners on the March 22nd, which is a closing keynote of KubeCon. Great, that is so exciting to have this at KubeCon. What was the inspiration to host us at KubeCon, and why is it so unique to have the United Nations as part of it? Yeah, no, because as I said, the SGGs are really created by UN, UNDP specifically. So that's pretty exciting in that sense. You know, so UNDP created those hackathons. And last year, I worked with Ted AI to organize a very similar hackathon, and we saw a lot of excitement and a lot of interest around how people were like, oh, yeah, we wanna solve those problems. And these problems are truly global problems. In that sense, aligns very well with the CNCF mission as well, making cloud-native computing ubiquitous. So if we can tap into that collective engineering, collective wisdom, collective community power to solve these global problems, global set of hackers, global problems, I think makes a really solid combination. And maybe Matusa, you can give us a little bit more background about what those SGGs are and how our participants can get involved in what kind of challenges are proposed by the UN. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Matisha Gajendran, and I'm from the UN OICT in the open source team. So OICT stands for Office of Information and Communication Technology. So as Arun said, the MDGs turn into SDGs but created by the UNDP. And it was really exciting for us to be able to collaborate with you guys and bring these 10 different challenges forward. And these challenges were all created to advance the delivery of the UN SDGs. And we partnered with UN, different UN agencies and also other organizations organization to put these challenge forward for the specific hackathon. And these 10 different challenges are goes into details from gender five, which is gender equality, gender SDG 10, which is reduced inequalities, so on and so forth. We have challenges that is related to heat redirection and building repurposing development, and so on and so forth. We also have one that's just about SDG five, which is online safety map. So there are ranges of challenges which you can choose to work from. And also you can create something that you can put forward yourself. We think that challenge is not something that you want to work on, but you can redirect to submit a challenge that fits well for this purpose. Great. And Daniel, what is your advice for participants when they are considering to submit their challenges and themes for the hackathon? I know you've done many before, so. Yeah, yeah. And my name is Daniel Crook. I just joined the CNCF about six months ago. At IBM, we did some great hackathons and saw some really innovative innovation around tech for good. I think when you look at the challenges, right? One of the most important thing to do is to bring a diverse team with you, right? So this isn't just technology that you're taking to solve our problem. You have to think about the end user, kind of understand the impact of the project. So bring together a team, maybe a really technical person, project manager, a designer, a subject matter expert coming together, kind of working together to provide the right full context around what you're building for someone. That's always been the number one tip, but number one tip we've always given to any sort of hackathon developers. It's not just focus on bringing forward job developers or forward designers, really try to assemble a super squad. Yeah, so if I take a perspective, for example, let's take one of the challenges that UN has proposed. So the first one is challenge one is comment cleaner. Now, oftentimes when you go to a website, they have this ability website forum, wherever it is, right? There is a capability that you can put a comment in there. Either it's a feedback or it's amazon.com or Reddit or Stack Overflow or whatever, right? You can leave a comment. Sometimes subconsciously, you know, because of our biases, we don't use proper language and not by malicious, there are malicious people as well, but accidentally we use a language that could be offending to other genders. So that particular challenge is like, how do you build like, you know, as Daniel was talking about, bring your Java skills out, bring your Python skills out, bring your TypeScript skills out that you can tap into by the time the comment is posted, before that you're able to interject into it, make sure the language is inclusive, gender appropriate, and if it is not, then either communicate back with the poster or automatically, you know, alter the comment so that it is gender appropriate or flag it somehow, that this may be abusive to some. So I think things like that, and that's really the simple concept, but that's what makes the world a sustainable place. You know, we really make the world a better place, one website at a time, one comment at a time. Yeah. We have a question here from Akeen. So what made you most tired on this path? I mean, for the global problem, I'd like to hear more details. So I'm not sure I understand the question, most tired on this path. I think kind of what brought us, and maybe Akeen, you can provide us a little more details, but what kind of brought us to this path of trying to be part of the larger global problems and how we can be part of that? No, I think as I said earlier, really the concept here is, if you think about the mission of CNCF is to be made cloud-native, ubiquitous. And if you think about, no matter where you go, private cloud, public cloud, edge, network, client, no matter where you go, cloud-native computing is ubiquitous. And if that computing platform is ubiquitous, how do we tie that in? And how do we tap into that collective wisdom to solve these global problems? So the common cleaner part that I'm talking about, I mean, the comments could be sitting anywhere as a matter of fact, in a website, in a forum, in an email, you could make it as a common cleaner, but imagine that could be injected into Gmail, for example, or whatever your favorite tool is to make more inclusive emails. I think the concept is simple, but it's not easy because it is gonna require really that global collaboration that how people understand and agree that this is the way to go forward. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up tools. Are there specific tools or technologies that participants are encouraged to use during the hackathon? Not at all, actually, as a matter of fact, we wanna keep it very, very generic, very open to anybody and everybody, and that's sort of the inclusive nature of CNCF. You could use whatever technology you wanna use, or whatever framework of your choice you wanna use, whatever operating system, whatever cloud provider, whatever API you wanna use. The focus really here is to solve the challenges, solve the problem. And so it's about solving the problem as being attached too much with the tool. We highly encourage people to use cloud-native technologies. A lot of the times what we have seen is, you can create models like large language models or foundation models or take an existing model and fine-tune the model so that it is more appropriate for a particular use case. So we have seen AI technologies being used for this. So I would say, generally, we are looking people to use cloud-native technologies, AI frameworks, and see how you can solve that problem and try to think in terms of, how can you keep the solution vendor agnostic? And it's okay if you wanna create a solution that is specific to a vendor, but focus again on solving the challenge. Independent of focusing too much on the tool, whatever tool works for you, we'll take it. Yeah. Yeah, if I could build on that, I'd say there's definitely used the CNCF projects. We have over 180 of them. Potentially there's something you can use as a starting point. Definitely there, look at the cloud-native projects. And then even within Linux Foundation, there's some great other open-source projects, including some from call for code with Linux Foundation. It's another tech for good program we've worked on and there's some starter kits in there, there's technology in there. So definitely explore, find out what's there, pull it together into a combined solution. We have a question that just came in. How to know more information to participate in such a hackathon? So I think from that kind of, to build on this question from Nadia is, how does someone get involved? Is it a diverse participant pool, different levels and skills and backgrounds? And what is kind of the approach that you think someone should be doing when they're getting ready to participate? Yeah, we would love, I mean, there's a link in the chat which refers to the website, the cloud-native hacks, which is on CNCF website, which talks about exactly what we would like you to do to participate in the hackathon. First of all, the hackathon is March 19th, 20th and 21st, co-located with KubeCon Paris. So I would like you to think about what challenges would you like to solve? If you have an idea, wonderful. If you don't have an idea, take a look at the UN proposed challenges. Say, I'm gonna solve this problem, bring a team together, talk to your workers, talk to your neighbors, talk to your friends who are in tech, bring them together, submit that proposal over there. And the way this is gonna work is, we are actively seeking out people to submit proposals to the hackathon. And there's a program committee sitting at the back and waiting for your proposals. So when your proposals come in, we evaluate the proposals based upon the merit of the proposal and the feasibility of the team that can they accomplish it. And then once we do it that way, then sometime in February, we're gonna announce which teams are gonna able to make it. And then essentially, once we go through that process, we give you an announcement and then we would like you to be there in person at Kube-Con-Paris, potentially hacking for the three days. So that's sort of the flow that we are looking at now. Great. I think kind of to segue into not just participants from how they get started, but will there be mentors available to help participants during the hackathon? I know that's always a big question that people have, is someone going to be available to help guide them if they get stuck? Yeah, definitely. We are looking at, you know, I mean, cloud-native computing is very, very diverse and very, very large. So there would definitely be mentors available. As a matter of fact, pretty much all of the program committee members are very deep into the cloud-native technology. So you will see a lot of people like that. We are also working with other folks who will probably be providing credits for the program as well. So they might be able to provide some mentors as well. And then of course, you know, there will be several folks. This is KubeCon. You're looking at about, you know, good several thousand developers who are going to be hacking out over there. So I would say when you come to do the hacking over there, walk out on the floor, just get a feel on what would be like if you want to solve a problem, all the conversations are really wonderful. Great. And then as we're talking about this relates to KubeCon, do they have to be registered to be, to KubeCon to be part of this? Or are they able to just join the cloud-native hacks without registering for KubeCon? Yeah, you don't need to be registered for KubeCon in order to join the cloud-native hacks. And so you just, you know, sign up for the hackathon. We get up there and that's it. You show up for the hackathon because the idea here is if you sign up for KubeCon, then you were there for three days, four days for KubeCon. And this is exactly overlapping with the event. So the hope, the goal would be, if you're coming for the hackathon, then you're staying around at the hackathon, maybe heading out for an hour or two, engaging with the other folks, but really spending majority of your chunk of your time on the hackathon, like really creating, solving that problem, you know, putting time and effort, designing, discussing, you know, what it needs to be. And I think Daniel, you were talking about the diverse skill sets, essentially. We need like somebody who can keep people on schedule, like a program manager. We need like a designer. We need like a coder. We need like somebody who can create that pitch, present to everybody. So I think there are multiple ways that, you know, those diverse skill sets would be there, which would be very relevant. I just want to jump in on that as well. I think the biggest misconception is that when it comes to hackathon, we're just looking for data scientists or developers, but it's more, we're looking for, like you said, pitchers or just people who are aware about the SDGs, more social, able to pitch. So it's good to have a team that can do all of that and come together and pitch that at the hackathon. Yeah. And I think to kind of help get people ready in looking for pitches or if they have questions, they can always join us on our CNCS Slack. The channel hashtag cloud native hacks is a great spot to kind of post those questions, meet people from other areas that might have the skill sets that they're looking for to form their teams. You don't have to know the people directly in order to build that team. You just have to be looking and excited to join and bring together a solution to a problem. While we're kind of talking about teams, what is the criteria that judges will use to evaluate the hackathon projects? Yeah, so we are working on a rubric essentially and the idea here is once you have done the hacking over 19th, 20th and 21st, we are looking at two rounds of judging. Depending upon the number of teams that we get, everybody gets to hack for 19th and 20th. 20th evening is when we're gonna have a round one judging and that round one judging is more like a science fair style judging. So wherever people, wherever they are sitting, judges will be assigned to them. They come and talk to them. They will have a rubric and in that rubric they will take a look at the innovativeness of the solution, the use of the technology of the solution, use of the data and then how closely the solution matches to the problem space or have they're diverted all together. So multiple ways, those are the rubrics that we will be using all along essentially. And if you go to the website, the judging criteria is also called out on the website and then are you gonna talk about that a little bit? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, so I just put a link there. Libby, you can share that to the judging criteria. What I think really is nice about this too, it's not just about the technology that you built, the amazing display of awesome AI but really being able to communicate the effect that this project is gonna have, how it's gonna be sustainable and how it's informed by real world expertise, right? So referring to this is a real problem. It's been identified by experts, not just something I just came up with which I think is gonna be a great idea. Really the judging not only focuses on technical merits but really about how this is gonna make a sustainable impact. So that's really important I think that the judge is gonna take a look into that and you're gonna have to communicate that. Great, we do have a question about team size. So what is the typical or revised team size that you think would be appropriate for this kind of hackathon? Yeah, I think this is a hackathon. So you're really hacking code. So we're looking at team sizes anywhere between two to five people essentially because when you're hacking you wanna do that peer programming. So that's where sort of the minimum of two that bring along a partner that you can hack together with. And as we were talking about the diversity of the skillset Mithusa kind of talked about that as well. A programmer, a data scientist, a developer, a subject matter expert, a domain expert. So I think depending upon a person could play different roles but two to five is sort of for the team size that we are looking for ideally that we would love to take it. Great, and I know teams are always looking for what kind of prizes are available, what kind of stuff will they get to participate? Can you elaborate on kind of what they can be looking for in the next couple of weeks as we get deeper into the hackathon? Yeah, absolutely. So well, you gotta get all the glory and fame for participating in the first ever hackathon. That should be good. In addition to that, there will be cash prizes as we don't have that exact thing locked up yet but that will be done soon. In addition to that, you will also, we are, the plan is we're gonna have of the teams that come in, we're gonna pick a few teams from, everybody will go through round one judging. From that round one judging, we'll pick a few teams that will continue hacking on March 21st as well. March 21st evening is when we will have around two judging and that's gonna be shock tank style judging. So for people who are not familiar, take a look at the shock tank show but really the judges will be sitting in a panel and everybody will be kind of presenting their cases and again, the judges will be given the rubric and to make sure that they evaluate the cases, studies accordingly. And then we will decide the winners on 22nd evening. The first, second and third prize winners will be announced and called up on the stage on 22nd morning in a closing keynote. So I think there's a lot of things that comes along with it. And of course, along with that, we will feature them on the CNCF website as part of our blogs. All good things come along with it. And I'm just sharing from a personal experience like last year when we did the TED AI hackathon when we promoted the winners, the winners actually got contacted by a lot of people that we would like to mentor you, we would like to coach you, we would like to give you VC money. So think in that language, solving that challenge is only one part of the equation that you're doing but there's probably a lot bigger element that is in prize for you. Wonderful. And then what kind of opportunities for participants beyond the hackathon post the hackathon are available, such as incubators or accelerators or industry connections. What kind of continued growth do you see past this? Yeah, absolutely. There is a startup fest that is happening at KubeCon. So there will definitely be opportunities. Like if you wanna create your own company, let's say you get really passionate about the idea and you believe in the idea that, oh, I can actually build a product out of it. So then there are definite opportunities. Now this is, we're looking at several thousand developers from all across the world coming to Paris and it's not just developers, it's like really senior executives across the company, the venture capitalists, the people who are mentors, founders, CEOs are coming over there. So depending upon what your ability is, depending upon what your interest is, are you focusing on just solving the problem during the hackathon or you will not take it forward, there will definitely be opportunities by which we can put you into those growth accelerator programs. Great. Madhu, so do you think that there's additional posts hackathon opportunities with helping the UN with their SDGs after the hackathon concludes from your standpoint? Yeah, absolutely. I think we will be able to mentor them in terms of the SDGs and how maybe even we can ask them if the UN is interested in kind of helping them out to scope their plans out. So yeah, there could definitely be an interest in that. Great. As we're kind of getting near the end of our live stream, I just wanna take a few minutes and give each of you an opportunity to share your most, what you think is the most important thing that people should know about the hackathon and what their next step should be. We'll let with us all start. Yeah, we'll start with Daniel. Let's kick that off with Daniel over there. All right, great. Yeah, no, I think a building on what Matusa said is really understand what the experts have said about these particular problem areas and understand them in depth so that you've limited your scope to something that's really gonna be powerful for what you can achieve in three days and that you can back it up with something that can be validated, you can share with the judges and then for the long after the hackathon, maybe it's something that you can build it to an open source project. So clearly define that scope, tie it to those SDGs, make sure it's validated and then let your creativity take it from there. Perfect, Matusa, what's your thoughts on what people should be taking away? Yeah, I think the most important one is team up, join a team to collaborate, share different skills between the team. I think that's quite important and pick a hackathon or a theme that interests you so that you're able to keep pushing yourself through that three days and plan ahead. Just really have an outline, a simple project plan and kind of stick to it because there is just two or three days and you don't want to be going all over the place and also just learn and adapt, embrace the challenge, learn on the go and be flexible about what you're doing. I'm going back to this point and again, it's just time management. Again, you only have three days so be very, very careful, allocate your time wisely and prioritize those essential tasks that you have when you do join those teams and most of all, just have fun. It is a very exciting hackathon and like Arun said, so many people and high executives are going to be there so really take this opportunity to just shine. Yeah, that's all. And then Arun, I think you kind of know to just get started but anything else you want to build on that? Yeah, I would. I would like you to think about, this is Paris. You want to come to Paris. You want to build a team together. You want to enjoy a heart crisis in the morning with a heart chocolate, solving these global problems. Don't think anywhere else. Get your coworkers excited, get your neighbors excited, get your colleagues excited. Build a team. That's what we need. We really want that energy between with you. We really want that cloud native skills, AI skills and our program management skills you have bring it on. We're gonna serve you heart crisis. That's our promise to you. I love that picture you just painted. I'm excited for Paris. I'm excited to have this first hackathon at KubeCon in the experience that it's going to provide all of our participants as well as our attendees and the way that it's gonna continue to move global problems forward and help kind of bring real case solutions to them. So thank you all for being here today. Thank you everyone who was able to join us on live streams. We're excited about this. If you have any questions as a reminder, go to the CNCS Slack channel and check out the channel, Cloud Native Hacks. So we're excited for all that. And don't forget to register for KubeCon, Cloud Native Con by 1159 CST today to receive the standard pricing. But as a reminder, you don't have to be registered for KubeCon to be a participant in the Cloud Native Hacks. And again, thank you so much. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much, everyone.