 Hi everyone, I'm Katie Grini. I'm an event manager for CNCF. I plan a my raid of events, including KubeCon. And I also support the Kubernetes Community Days program, also known as KCDs. And I'm Bill Mulligan. I used to work at CNCF, and I help restart the KCD program. I've been involved in a couple of ones as a community member, and now I'm over at Isovalent working on the Cilium and EBPF communities. Great. And today, we're presenting about Kubernetes Community Days for fun and for community profit. So with that, you might be wondering, what exactly is the Kubernetes Community Day program? Well, if you're here at KubeCon, you kind of already know what a Kubernetes and Cloud Native conference. You can think of a KCD as a scaled down way of doing a KubeCon for your local community. It's a great way. I'm sure all of you have met some great friends here, amazing connections, other people you want to follow up with after the conference. KCDs are a great way to connect with other people and have these same conversations in your local region. I know for me, it was about a 14 hour flight to get here. What if you could instead take a 14 minute walk down the street to go and have these same conversations? That's what the KCD program is all about, is it's bringing Cloud Native to your local community to learn, to collaborate, to network, and advance the Cloud Native community as a whole. We've had KCDs all over the world, as you can see by the logos at the bottom. And it's been an amazing experience to work with all of the great people behind it. So beyond just that, they're a lot of fun. These are a lot of pictures from the KCD program that happened in Berlin this summer. It was actually our first KCD program. A lot of them were happening virtually because of the pandemic. But it was really exciting to see all these Cloud Native technologists joining in one place in person to talk about Kubernetes, to share a drink, and to even go boating. So this could be you. I think that's a great point that you brought up, Bill. They're built up. A lot of people are starting to happen in person. But they can happen online and virtually as a hybrid program as well. It's a way to bring education and information to your local community. And it doesn't always have to be directly in person to be impactful. So as I was saying, and as we saw in the logos, KCDs are happening all around the world. This map is a couple of where they've happened in 2022. But we're seeing them pop up in lots of different places around the globe. These represent KCDs that are happening in the latter half of the year and into 2023. Yeah, and so your next question may be, OK, this sounds like something that's cool. Who can who's organizing them and who's doing it? So when you don't have Katie here to do all the tech support for own talk, who's actually putting it together? Well, it's people in the Cloud Native community. It's people like CNCF ambassadors, it's CNCF community evangelists, it's members of its people at member companies. It's the people who are organizing the Cloud Native meetups in your local organization. And it might even be you. For me, for instance, I've been involved in the program committee for both KCD Berlin and also for KCD Munich. And I'm looking forward to helping out with KCD Zurich next year. So you could be the person helping make a KCD possible in your own local community. Now the question is, why would you want to organize one? What's the benefits of this for you? Why would you want to get involved? As we were talking about before, for me, it's really about the people. I think I really love connecting with people in the Cloud Native community. And that's what KCDs bring to the community. So it's a way to collect people from around you to share ideas and talk about them. And it's a great thing is the next time you see those people, it doesn't have to be six months later at the next KubeCon, you can have lunch with them the next week. It's the people who you're going to see on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis that are going to be in your local area. I think that's a great network to build. You'll also, if you're a meetup organizer, you can grow the impact of your local meetup instead of having one or two talks every month. You can have a half day, a full day, two days, and be able to share that information with your community. I'm sure you have a bunch of submissions or a bunch of things you'd like to hear talks about and there's people who'd like to present about that in their community, in your community. And it's a great way to expand it beyond just one or two talks a month. As I said before, you can meet lots of friends and business partners in the cloud-native space. For me, for instance, I have gone around to a bunch of KCDs and been able to connect with a lot of people that I like hanging out with. And I know a lot of new business partnerships have come out of the cloud, out of the KCDs that you need to. For instance, I know one person that's here because they're organizing a KCD, one of the sponsors actually paid for them to come to KubeCon. So that could be you too. And lastly, it's also about, I think, really growing the grassroots of the cloud-native community too. So as you probably know, KubeCon has a very low acceptance rate. I think it's below 10%. It's not a space where everybody can present because there's just not space or time to be able to do that. KCDs are a great way to expand the reach, to let new speakers take the stage, get practice, and be able to hopefully one day present at KubeCon too. I'm a new KubeCon speaker, so that's exactly what KCDs do. It also does professional growth. You can learn how to plan and organize events. There's a lot, it also allows you to grow your community and bring talks that might be engaging for your community or places for people to learn how to continue to grow. There might be novice and beginners in your community. There might be experts or intermediates, and it's a great place for them to kind of get together and learn from each other and grow and expand. You'll also learn how to separate new technologies and trends within cloud-native. A lot of people are doing really cool things in the cloud-native industry. So it's a cool place to kind of have that like filtered grassroots conversations around the technology and what people are doing. You can also use it to sustain the cloud-native community and network with local adopters of technologies. So it's a time to kind of bring together people who have been in the community for a long time. Maybe there's a few people within the community ready to join. It's a great way to connect them. It's a great place for us to bring together the meet-up group that's about the technology. So getting started, you don't have to know all the information when you wanna get started, but to get started having some initial details, going to the CNCF Kubernetes Days GitHub is a great place to go. You can see all the other issues that are currently open with KCDs who are currently in the process of planning. It's a great place for you to determine if you can host a KCD in your area or join a local KCD that's already started. Just initially wanting much information that's on the slide ready, or you can have as little as I can reach out and we're here to help and make this process seamless. There are terms and conditions to having a KCD. It's just to make sure that you have a successful event that you're abiding by the CNCF standards. We wanna make sure that we're setting you up for, I mean lack of better words, success, right? We want this to be something that continues not just once, we want it to be something that you host annually. We want to make sure that your community grows. We wanna make sure that as you're growing your community you're thinking about meet-ups and that those meet-ups are happening maybe monthly, maybe quarterly, maybe by annually, whatever works best for your community but we're here to support that and this terms and conditions help us ensure that we're giving you that proper support and that you feel confident and comfortable in what you're doing. In addition to all of that, we've also made this process a little bit simpler. I know event planning is super daunting. I've been in it for 15 plus years now and I still get butterflies and nervous and I have moments in the middle of the night where I wake up so it's okay to feel that pressure. We've tried to make it as easy as we can by creating templates around how to organize your event, have checklist on when you should be, like what you should be doing three months out, two weeks out, a week out from your event. We have templates around sponsorships and registration templates and if you see something that's missing, let us know, Audra and I are happy to make that template for you. So a few new features that happened this year. I talked a little bit about the templates for getting started, how to have sponsorships, registration, questions, AV setup. We've also recognized that a video on how to use our programs like SM Apply and Bevy were needed, so we've created those as well, kind of step by step processes of issues that you might run into when you're utilizing those. We've also organized an organizer's meetup. It's a great place for us to share topics related to the planning process and to have peer to peer learning. The best thing is to know that you're not alone in this process. There are a lot of other organizers out there who are either coming up against the same issues or thinking through fun ways to bring their community together and it's a great place to learn from each other. And then we also learned that within Bevy, you're able to pull your own analytics now, which is really huge. You weren't able to do that before you would have to go through Audra and I. Additionally, we've implemented credly badges. We've gone ahead and given those to people who participated in 2021 and we're issuing them for 2022. For 2023, we're super excited to send out quarterly surveys with our organizers. This data and getting your feedback helps us to ensure the growth of the program. We're also looking at how to implement training at KCDs in the future for 2023. So having a day of content or maybe half a day of content with a half a day of training or a day of training is something that CNCF would really like to support and provide all of the organizers and all of you who are in this room because I think after this you're going to go out and have a KCD. So we'd like to support that. We're also going to relaunch the speaker bureau and a program called CNCF first. This is just to help when you're either struggling to get CFP submissions, if you're struggling with getting a diverse CFP submissions, this is a great place where people are going to indicate that they want to speak at your event. Maybe there's someone who's going to talk about a specific technology to help round out your program. And then lastly, we will be issuing a annual transparency report around KCDs and that growth and success that happens with it. So with that, some of the lessons learned of organizing 10 of the KCDs all around the globe and what will help set you up for success. So the first one, start small. I know you may be super excited about bringing the community together and say you want to plan the next QCon, but that takes a whole team, more than a whole team. It's good to even have just 100 people. I know a couple of KCDs that started with just that and they're growing each year. You don't need to have the biggest event to begin with and sustainability of your event is more important than that because it's these relationships that come back year after year is what is really going to help grow the community. So the first thing that you should do is to go to that people, see if there's a local meetup. You don't need to do something big. You don't need to do something big. We've had really successful KCD programs that are even just a half day or one full day in a single track. You can even have just like five or six sessions as a way to expand that. The second part, definitely think about diversity from the beginning. I think that's the core tenant of the cognitive community and you should make sure you think about it before you even begin. Reach out to your community early. Make sure that you have a diverse set of companies organizing it, a diverse set of people looking at the CFP people reaching out and promoting about the CFP. It's also good to reach out to local clubs. Maybe there's an AWS cloud meetup in your area or different organizations like say like Girls Who Code who might be interested in speaking at KCD. Also, it's great to have a connection to the universities in your area. Students are always looking to, I guess, kind of get their first experience in their job outside of the university and the academic setting. This is a great transition of getting people into the cloud native industry too. And you should really reach out to them to tell them about your event and help them grow. And the great thing is they can help you grow the event too. Their reach can become your reach too. You should also reach out at any point to the CNCF ambassadors. They're people who are very energetic and engaged about the cloud native community. I'm sure they'll be very happy to help you. And also you have a great team on the CNCF with Katie and Audra. And I'm sure they'd be happy to help with anything that you want. Running events, while each of them, it's kind of like, is unhappy in their own way. There are a lot of similarities between events. So you can leverage the templates. There's a lot of things that you need to do in terms of promoting it, in terms of how to do the CFP. Obviously there's minor details that'll be different and you'll have to work out those by yourself. But the templates are a great place to start. You can leverage years, even decades of experience of running events before. And also consider tying your KCD to another local event. So we've had great partnerships with things like OpenStack Days. There's one in KCD LA's pairing with Scale. And there's also one in KCD Mania that was co-located with... DevSlam out there. Yeah, DevSlam. And then in Taiwan they co-located with CCOCS. Yeah, it's like an open source event there. So it's a great way to connect your community to a larger audience too. So building your team. It's a great idea from the start to kind of have regular check-ins with both your team and CNCF. We're here to help you. We're here to support you. We're here to work through any challenges you have. Chances are whatever challenges you have, another KCD has had it before or we've even had it within our own events and we can help kind of guide you through that process. Create a call cadence with your team and review the checklist that you have. Identify who's working on what. But also realize that there's flexibility in roles. So you may be working on, say, the CFR promotion and someone else is working on registration but the person who's working on promotion needs help. You can jump over and help them. There's not a simple I'm in this one role. You're all here to help each other. You're all here to learn from each other. So just remember that you're working towards a shared goal and you're here to be one team. And then confirm a check-in cadence with the CNCF. Both Audra and I are active on Slack. Using the GitHub issue is a great way for us to track communication back and forth outside of email. It just allows us to see if Audra's out of office what kind of conversation she's had or I can jump in and answer it as well. We all know disagreements happen. They happen in everyday life. They're gonna happen at work as well. We all have visions of what we want the program to look like. There's no wrong or right way around that. But we're here to help and we're happy to help. The CNCF is here to be a neutral voice. So if you are having disagreements and you just can't seem to find a common ground, definitely reach out. We're here to help kind of neutralize that and find a compromise. And just remember we're all working towards the same goal. So no one has one right approach to getting there and that's kind of the beauty of these programs. And don't do it alone. Reach out to your community. They're here to help guide you in what they want to learn and how they want the program to learn. Is that they did half a day of content and then a bunch of networking at the end. You could do a lot of content heavy programs or you can specify specific topics. They like that what they like to learn more about for the next one. Yeah and another question is once your event is in progress or done, how do you consider was it successful or not? I think the big thing that we've been trying to say here is that there's no right way, there's no wrong way, there's no cookie cutter way to do a KCD. Every single community around the globe has different needs, has different ones, have different things that they're focusing on. So there's not one perfect way to do a KCD. What you should like focus on as a way to make sure that the cloud native community continues to grow and I think what would be a success for the program as a whole and for your event is one, making sure that you elevate people who wouldn't otherwise to get the opportunity to speak. This is about helping grow the cloud native community at the grassroots level, make sure that you help people do that. The second one is educating the meeting and meet the needs of your local community. So what Katie was saying, reach out to your local community, figure out what they want, make sure that you're focusing on that. That'll make your program successful for your local community. And the last one is really just empower your community by planning different types and size of events by depending on the region. Just as the same way it wouldn't make sense to do a KCD with only French speakers in Indonesia, there's lots of other details like that that aren't as obvious. You should focus on the needs and the wants of your community and different types of events as I was saying are all gonna have different types of challenges. A virtual event is gonna have different than an in-person event, a two-track event is gonna have different challenges than a one-track event. So you are gonna need to tackle each of those challenges but the CNCF team is here to support you too. And some of the program successes that we had. So when I was still at CNCF, we launched the program back in 2021. I think it was really cool. It was the first year I had absolutely no idea what was gonna happen or if anybody was gonna show up and I think the community really turned up much to my surprise and delight. So we had 12 KCDs that were in-person, virtual, and hybrid in multiple different languages. We had over 7,500 people. A lot of them knew to the cloud native community and connecting them into what we're doing here at KubeCon and in 12 different countries. I think the coolest thing for me was that right KubeCon is three times a year, it's in very small cities or it's in very large cities but only a small fraction of the population. You saw Priyanka's keynote, there's seven million people and we only have about 7,000 here. That's a fraction of the percentage of people that are in cloud native. KCDs have allowed us to take the cloud native community instead of bringing the cloud native community, we're able to bring the cloud native community to the world and it was really cool to see the program launch to that. Beyond that, we also have a bunch of successes and what we're talking about, like growing the cloud native community. And so this is actually a talk from the last KubeCon. This person went to KCD Banglaru and he got inspired at the contributor summit there. He started contributing to Kubernetes and actually became a maintainer of one part of the Kubernetes project. So getting new contributors was also talked about in the keynote, into the projects, getting them to become maintainers of the projects so that we do have more people maintaining the projects that we all rely on and he even spoke at KubeCon too. So I think it's great to see people really progress in that track from the first speaking opportunity, sorry, from the first contribution to becoming a maintainer to the first speaking opportunity, it's really amazing to see the KCD program lifting people up like that. And this is what you could bring to people in your local community too. And it's been some great successes as the beginning of October. In-person, virtual, and high presentations in multiple languages, like Phil said, that's huge, especially for your local KCD. 450 plus, over 8,700 attendees across 15 countries and we're yielding a 20, we're actually at 21% of non-male speakers after Munich and Nina. Overall program successes, just over the last few years, these are the kind of highlights that we have hosted 63 events, 16,000 plus attendees, 501 KCD chapter members, averaging, and 24 chapters in general. So what will your community gain? This is a big one. You're gonna gain new friends, new colleagues. You're gonna have a local support system. When you're stuck on a problem, it's great to be able to have that new connection that you can reach out to. And then it's like Bill said, a connection to the larger cloud native community. There has been talks about some KCDs providing surplus in their budgets to promote a local community member come to larger KCDs, or to the larger coupon. So those kind of things help the growth of the ecosystem overall and show that importance around it. Not everything has to be code related, but knowing that we all have that open mindset and many minds are better than one helps to grow the community. I feel like they keep saying that, it helps ultimately. And then it just has acceleration, growth around projects. As Bill said, one person started to contribute to Kubernetes and become a maintainer that can happen within your own community as well. It helps you to connect to other communities where we have a KCD organizers channel where you're talking to other organizers across the globe. So it has a way to connect and learn from each other. And it helps to build an internship or contribution within a business. Obviously I'm hopeful that everyone in this room will walk out here and want to become a KCD organizer. It's a lot of fun. Feel free to ask us to all, or to Audra and I can Slack. Check out the GitHub, check out the website. We're here to help. Don't be scared. Half the battle is just started. So just join and reach out and we're happy to answer anything. Yeah, and I'm also happy to answer. I'm not involved in any of the organization anymore, but I have seen a few of them. So if you have any questions, I'm also happy to help too. With that, I think thank you for coming today. Yeah. Yeah, for that, the recommendation is to have at least three people from three different companies. So you're hearing voices from many different people. It can grow. I think KCD UK is here. You all have how many people? Nine people, that's what I thought. So there's no set number. Three is a great starting point. But if you have nine or 12 or seven or five, that's great too. Okay, okay. Yeah. So it's all from local sponsors. Yeah. We do provide you access to platforms, which is a big contributing factor in your cost. So we offer you access to like SM Apply or Bevy. You are not like, it's not a hard line in the sand that you have to use those programs, but we do have those programs available for you. Yeah. Yeah. You have to be an organizer and actively contributing to the KCD. You can't just kind of join a KCD and not contribute. Your fellow organizers will let us know. So that's a short answer to it. If you're interested on more information about it and those kind of check marks, you can send me a message and I'd be happy to share it with you. Ambassador, and then you're not all from one organization either, so there's no biases. You're coming together as a community. I believe you had a question first. Are there any guidelines for sponsors, restrictions? I mean, do we need to have the proper sponsors approved or vetted? No, so there's not any rules about... The only rule is that you can't say a company can't sponsor. This is like a community event and you can't say, that's our competitor. They can't be a part of this. It's open to anyone, just like the cloud native community. So you need to be open to anybody sponsoring. But to clarify on that too, you don't have to have a successful KCD. It's nice to have because it helps you out financially to be able to host, especially if you're hosting it in person. But if you weren't able to get a sponsor for your event, KCD Spain did this recently and they just went fully virtual on the Bevy platform. Yeah. So like I said, there are profits that come from the event that is kind of settled between each KCD and how they wanna handle that. A lot of KCDs end up donating it in the name of the KCD to a local organization. I know KCD DC donated it to Red Cross. I believe all of you are donating any surplus you have. A few people have talked about taking that money and putting it into like a diversity scholarship to promote someone to come to KubeCon within their local area. So it's kind of up to you how you handle that, but donating it within the name of your KCD is always great idea. Yeah. But with that process, a specific company has to hold onto it. And that's kind of where it gets a little complicated and we can talk through that process and how to work through that as well. So we're gonna cut off here and kicked off the stage, but if you want to talk to us, we'll be just outside the doors and we're happy to answer any other questions. So yeah, thanks. Thanks everyone.