 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to our session, a pathway to CNCF citizenship via community bridge. My name is Ken Owens. I am with FISA currently pre-use house at Mastercard and in my free time, I can go out with my children and do outdoor activities and have fun outside. Hi, I am Darshan Chaudhary. I work as a software developer in Bangalore, India. Outside of work, I like to read fiction most mixed with history. We have divided the talk into two parts. In the first part, I will discuss what is LFX mentorship and in the second part, Ken will talk about why you should care about participating. When we submitted the talk proposal, the program was called community bridge program and the name change is a testament to how quickly things change in the cognitive landscape. The stated mission of the LFX mentorship program is to accelerate the adoption, innovation and sustainability of open source software. It is essentially a mentoring platform that provides project based mentorships. The platform invites all CNCF projects to submit proposals. Each proposal is a description of some work that the project wants to get done. It can be a new feature or improvement in some part of the program or a set of bug fixes related to a certain subset of the project. Each proposal also has a mentor who will guide the mentee for the duration of the program. So the LFX mentorship program is similar to the Google Summer of Code, the GSOC program in some sense. In that there are projects which apply with ideas and there are mentors who take mentees and guide them through the duration of the program. The important difference is that the LFX mentorship program is directed towards the professionals working in the industry, whereas GSOC is only for university students. People who are not currently enrolled in a university program cannot apply to GSOC, but everybody is welcome to apply in the LFX mentorship. Speaking about the program, it was launched in 2019. The original pilot had three mentees. In the Q1 of 2020, there were seven mentees that participated that graduated from the program. In the Q2, which is when I participated as well, there were pretty good mentees. And the Q3 Q4 run had pretty three mentees and there's an ongoing program right now, ongoing run right now, which has 35 project ideas that were submitted. The duration is three months and there's a student stipend as well. This stipend basically depends on variability. So it ranges from 3000 to 6.6 thousand USD and it depends on the purchasing power parity of the place where you live. So the program duration can be divided into four phases. The first stage is the project applications open stage. This is where the platform is open for proposals from CNCF projects. The proposal has to include a description of the problem and also the mentor who will be working with the mentee on that problem. The second phase is the applications open for mentees phase. So this is where all the proposals that were submitted by the participating projects are reviewed by the mentees. So the mentees go through all these proposals and apply to the projects that they like. Each mentee can apply for up to three projects to maximize their chances of getting selected. Of course, get selected to only one, but they can apply to three. And the entire phase lasts for two weeks. Now this is the mentee application review phase, the third phase, which is quite important. This is when there are discussions between mentors and mentees. The discussions can be in the form of the mentors asking the mentees to give a SOP a statement of purpose or they can have a discussion even to see if the mentor and the mentee are a good match for the project. Finally, after the third phase, you enter the longest phase, which is the coding phase. This last spot 12 weeks. Generally at the beginning in the first week itself there's a periodic meeting which is set up between the mentor and the mentee. I think with respect to the mentees progress on the project. It's a recurring meeting, it's a periodic meeting and usually it's a weekly meeting though that depends on the mentor and the mentee. The agenda is to talk about last week's work and also plan out the work for the coming week. This is where the mentee can pick the mentor's brain and get help on any issue they might be stuck on. At the end of the first half of the coding phase, there's a midterm evaluation, after which the mentee is paid half the second. And after this end of the week 12, which is another coding phase also the there's a final evaluation and the mentee is paid the remaining month. So now I'll talk about my personal experience in the program. I found the program to be quite competitive to get in. I think I applied to all the three projects to maximize my chances and it was a huge relief and I got accepted. I tried to boost my candidature by raising years to projects, but in the end, I wasn't 100% sure I'll get in, but when I got in it was just nice. It was also all worth it because participating is a great learning opportunity. It's not trivial, and this is not something you could do in a weekend, you could finish in a weekend. They are challenging and fun. CNCF projects also have a very high standard of code quality, and you have to make sure that your contributions are of great quality to accept it. You learn a lot as well. Apart from the mentors that you interact with, you also get to sort of talk to and work with other members of the community. And everyone teaches you something new. Some tips I can share here is choose a project that you're really passionate about that you really like. Choosing a project that you aren't passionate about is a recipe for someone happy times. You'll have to work on the difficult problem that you won't be motivated to do so. Yeah, find a project which you really like. Also, build a case for your candidature. There are a lot of mentees applying, and you need to make sure that you send out. Try to make yes to the project, write blogs, showcasing a familiarity with the project, talk to the mentors, everything counts, and make sure that the mentor has a good reason to choose you over everyone else. And in my, at the end of my internship, I was invited to be a member of the project that I participated in. So that happens as well you basically can create a long term association with the project that you worked on, because working with a community for 12 weeks brings you close to them. You have greater familiarity with the project and we actually contribute even after the duration of the internship. Okay, so now can we talk about Dubai. Thank you, that was awesome. I appreciate your comments and your input and a lot of the suggestions you made great. So, thank you for that. For my part, I want to just kind of provide some of the mentors, sort of background and perspective into this. So, you know, kind of why would you want to be involved with community bridge I think it's, you know, for one, it's really involving the community which is really important, not only in for the CNCF and our user community but also for the open source community that we want to be involved in and so getting involved helping out the community and supporting the community is something that I think is a goal for all of us in the CNCF. The other piece that's important to keep in mind is a fresh perspective. As you, you look at, you know, the mentees that are coming into this program they're very diverse backgrounds that they have a lot of different opportunities to bring a perspective to, you know, a larger organization is needed, especially as we're looking at the cloud native transformations we're doing. One of those lines is the culture that you're bringing into them into is also important to consider because you don't want to just force them into the culture that your organization has but you also at the same time have to consider how your culture is going to impact them and how they can bring some of their own culture and their own perspectives into the into the discussions is very important. And of course, you know, a big part of being in this program is to give back, whether it's, you know, a time, the projects, you know, contributing to the projects being part of that community again. It's important that we, you know, continually looking at how we can make our community better how we can make the CNCF community stronger and striving to, you know, bring the best best value and the best minds together to make, you know, cloud native not, not just a, you know, a hot, you know, fad that's going to end at some point but continue to iterate and grow into the community that we becoming already. The next, you know, pieces is sort of looking at the process and the process is important to understand because it's not, it's not quite what you used to maybe as you think about the way you recruit today and the way you work in business today and so as you kind of heard Darshan mentioned it's important to think about how you want to provide support for a project in the community. The advertisement and how you want to try to make make your project stand out is a big part of that process and so as a mentor I want to track the best mentees that I could. I think we should advertise the work that we're doing what we're trying to contribute to what what project we're contributing to and what the requirements are to be able to really, you know, be successful in this role. And as I think really important to sit that expectation up front that you know we want you to be successful we want to be successful we're trying to, you know, solve a business problem. To say that as end users, you know, we don't, you know, it's fun, we actually have a business problem with solving the, you know, the best talent we can to help us solve those problems and so making it clear what those requirements are. And after you, you know, get a list of the potential mentees, it's important to kind of look through that list. Pick out the ones that you really think, you know, on on paper, I'm going to provide you the best value for what you're looking to accomplish. The program does a great job of providing the right level of detail. You don't have to guess or try to figure out have the right people applying for this this role. They ask the right questions they have filling the right information so you know right off the bat. What what mentees are going to make a good fit. You then kind of look at that list and in my case I had about 12 mentees that applied for my my project. I went through that list and I want it down to about six that made you know the cut that look like they would be the best of the of the pool to look for. We didn't interviewed those individuals and discuss, you know, kind of what the project was we tried to, you know, set expectations and make sure they understood what we're trying to accomplish and then doing that. It really helped in many ways, but I think the biggest ways really helped to like, you know, make sure that we have the right individuals and we have the right setting of those goals and then expectations and outcomes that we're looking for. So, kind of what was I looking for right what do mentors look for in this role I think it's, it's primarily individuals that are, you know, coming into this project, looking to, you know, have a passion like kind of a Dutch mission they have a passion for what we're trying to accomplish. They get it very quickly understand why we're trying to accomplish it. What weeks isn't a long time, you know, and so you only get six friends and in our case we're doing two weeks friends you only get six friends out of, out of the time frame that you have the intern and so you're really looking to make sure that you have someone who's a self started that you get going they want to be successful. They want to get back to the community, you know, kind of going back to the previous, previous bullets of you know why isn't it important to, to be in this, this program to begin with. And then as you kind of look through and talk to those individuals it becomes very apparent the ones that that have that drive, have that for a minty project. The next bullet then is I think really important to think about because you, you want to, as you select this individual you need to make sure that once you select them that you then set clear expectations with them. You explain what you the outcomes are you explain what the business problem is you're trying to solve you explain what the project is that you want to be involved in. In our case we try to provide as much detail as we could about the project we try to give them as much information on how to join the community we try to introduce them into the community. We picked a few of the, you know, open issues that need to be resolved that that looked like there would be good issues to get involved with as as a company and we asked them to kind of start with these issues. You know, as you heard from Dush and kind of spent some time working through these issues, contributing, you know, some some code back to the community and then that project said hey why don't you, you know, as you heard from Dush and join us and then become one of our, you know, contributors, which is awesome right it's great when you see the mentees really take on a project take on a problem work hard at it and then solve it. And I kind of gave them also like the, you know, it was like two week effort to kind of gave him some really good experience and in the project we were trying to get involved in, and it built up that confidence that he can solve and do other problems that we needed to have solved and so, you know, each friend after that he continued to grow and build on that momentum and that's what you're looking for. And then, you know, the last bullet is really important to just keep, you know, remembering to you always want to, you know, do that, set the expectations for the next two weeks. We, you know, work through the two weeks of coding review at the end of what you had done and then set the goals for the next two weeks and so just keep that sprint review iterate, you know, the type of that that model going the whole time. These, in terms of like being a mentor, I think it's important as you as you sign up to be a mentor you want to consider why you signed up. And a lot of that has to do with, you know, you know, in my case I really like to work with with the community I really like to work with developers that are, you know, coming into this environment that are trying to learn more about the community want to be more involved in our community. And I want to try to, you know, convey as much of my background, my experiences, ways to solve problems I think would be helpful to, you know, this group of a very talented individuals that we have, you know, come into our community now. However, you know, understand why you're doing this and have your passion come through have your desire to make, you know, this program very successful make this this relationship with your mentee very successful. To me, you know, a lot of that has to do with feedback. You know, consider it, but thoughtful feedback to your, to your mentee is very important, right and it's always about the context and the content that you're trying to provide right so it's, it's not just asking them to do something. They're saying hey it'd be great if you did X, it's really explaining and sitting down and, you know, getting on the screen and coding with them and showing them, you know, a better way or a different way of thinking through a problem and coding it up. I always do that in a thoughtful way it's not, you know, you're not trying to overwhelm them with too much details right they're not senior, and then most of these use cases right much of these, these projects were supporting but they are very good, good resources and so you don't want to, you know, overwhelm them too much. The other thing is to be open. Make sure that they have the ability to reach you any time to spend time with you. And in my case, we would, you know, meet at the beginning and end of the project every, you know, every week we would have like a kind of a quick touch base as a project team as a sprint team right, but then I would spend every week. To dedicate time just to sort of, you know, do some clear planning and do some coaching. Give, give Dasha a chance to ask questions about what we're working on why we're working on it the business side of why we're trying to do what we're trying to do. And the source plays into an enterprise organization and some of those types of discussions right just to kind of make sure that he understood that there's more to this project than just, you know, going through the coding steps and joining the community and contributing to it there's also the why and then why is important as you as you're growing, you know, clearly obviously. And the last thing is sort of beyond the community bridge or the LFX mentoring platform right there's, there's a relationship that you're trying to build here and, and in our case we spent, you know, some time getting to know each other, we, you know, we talked weekly. Like I mentioned, after the internship ended I wanted to continue that relationship because to me it's all about mentoring is not just a three, you know, 12 week. It's not just a friend. It's, you know, it's important in that 12 weeks but it's important to continue after that 12 weeks and so I spent time, you know, monthly with with darshan after the internship ended, and you know, we'll continue to to work with with darshan as much as possible monthly from from here on out and have a chance to meet him one day after COVID's over maybe so. So with that, you know, I want to thank you very much for your time. I want to thank darshan for, you know, being a great, great intern for us did a great job and we're very proud of the work you've done and wish you a lot of continued success. And with that, we'll take whatever questions you have. Thank you.