 I think we're going to get going here. It's 11.15 by my clock and we have next 90 minutes of a lot of fun here. Hi, good morning, everybody. My name is Arun Gupta. I am on the CNCF governing board and I happen to be the chair as well. I'm very excited to be part of the CNCF governing board town hall. We have several governing board members here and we have only a few slides, but we expect this to be a more interactive session. And there are a few governing board members in the audience as well. So if you are on the governing board, please raise your hand and sitting in the audience. So we have a few governing board members, so Alan, Sudha are there. So feel free to engage in the conversation. By no means this is a panelist versus attendees here. Okay, so yeah. So maybe let's start with the introduction first of all. My name is Arun. As I said, I work for Intel. I lead the open ecosystem team there. I've been on the governing board seven years. And this is my second time elected governing board chair. And this is my third company on the governing board itself. And with that, I'll pass on to Kristoff. Hello, everyone. My name is Kristoff Flecker. I work at Red Hat in my day job, but I actually sit on the governing board as one of the two elected maintainer representatives. So I particularly represent the Kubernetes community. And then there's my other colleague Craig Box. My name is Jeremy. I am a data dog and I lead the open source and technical community programs there. Second year on the governing board is the one of the silver. So if you're a silver member, feel free to grab it. Hey, my name is Steven Chen. I'm the VP of DevRel at JFrog. I've been on the governing board for a while. I haven't been counting. And I think it's a really great opportunity to work with other folks. I represent the gold member companies. So we try to bring all that knowledge back to the gold member companies and represent issues for them. And I think as much as possible, we want to make the Kubernetes ecosystem really strong. So we're excited to hear and engage with all of you and get feedback. Hello, my name is Alina Prokhorchuk. I'm a principal software engineer at Apple. And that's my second term on the governing board. I used to be there as a part of French here in the West. I'm Ian Bertusio. I'm from Google's open source programs office and have been on the board as part of our membership in the CNCF. Hello, I'm Lachlan Evenson. I've been on the governing board for the CNCF since 2019. So if you can all remember back to those days, I think San Diego was the conference I first joined the governing board. I work on Azure Cloud and we have many projects in the CNCF. So it's great to be able to represent those projects and help build the ecosystem. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Emily Fox. I chair the technical oversight committee for CNCF. So I sit on the governing board in that capacity and I've been here just over a year, I think. Loose track of time. It's so much fun. Awesome. Just to give a lay of the land, how many are silver members of CNCF? Any silver members here? A couple. Any gold members here? One. Any end users here? No end users. Okay. Well, make it tough. Don't make it easy on us. I'm just going to give a structure of what CNCF governing board is about or how CNCF is structured. But ask us tough questions. Keep us challenged. How does a CNCF governance look like? If you think about it, it's a three-legged tool, essentially. There is governing board, which is responsible for the administrative, financial aspect of the foundation itself, which is a CNCF foundation. Then there is technical oversight committee, which is sort of which drives the technical agenda of the foundation. What projects get and what projects stay? What is a sandbox incubation graduation criteria? How does that work? The overall technical direction of the foundation itself. And more recently we created this end user technical advisory board. Because if we leave it up to the vendors, until by itself being a vendor, we're going to take it in a very different direction. End users are the ones that keep us all grounded, that truly serve the needs of the customers and make it really relevant. And all of that, if you think about that three-legged tool, the seat on top of that is the support that is provided by the Linux Foundation staff, the CNCF staff. So you saw the keynote this morning by Priyanka Sharma. There are several members of the staff here that we work very intimately and closely with to make all of this work. So think of this as a three-legged tool with a seat, and that's how we take this entire journey forward. I kind of touched into this a little bit. If you think about it in terms of governing board, what do we do? Marketing, financial, and business oversight. We meet regularly. There's a Slack channel. There's an email list. There are discussions that happen there quite regularly. Any copyright trademark and IP policies that happen over there. So we have different subcommittees where the work is being carved out. There's a marketing committee. There is a budget committee. There is a legal committee, which are subcommittees of the governing board itself, where the discussions happen, and then they make a decision, and then it comes back to the governing board. But what is it that we need to do over there? So that's sort of the element that we look at it. License exceptions goes to the legal committee. They make a recommendation. It comes back to the governing board. And if there are concerns, there are issues, then we can raise it up, discuss this as a board, and do the right thing over there. TOC, Technical Oversight Committee, is where you hear the most excitement happening, and I'm sure Emily can talk about that endlessly. But that's sort of where it provides a technical vision for CNCF. What new projects are going to come in? These new working groups, these tags, the AIML working group that you heard about, which is part of the tag runtime, what's happening in that direction. If there are not just technologies, a lot of people thing as well, so how do we make people work with each other? So there are a lot of those elements coming around over there. Have that entire project life cycle from, by the time the project idea is proposed by pulling a request, like sending a PR, all the way to archival of the projects. What does that life cycle look like, and what support do we need? Does the project really need funding from CNCF, in which case the recommendation could be made to the governing board, and then take it from there. Again, the relationship is very tight. And as I talked about, the End User Technical Advisory Board is sort of where the voice of the end user community. And there are a couple of end users, Elena being from one of the end users, Apple, Boeing is also on the governing board. So there are a couple of end user member companies who are smack at the governing board itself. But this end user technical advisory board is sort of a space which is vendor free, but is only consisting of end users. And we took this initiative last year where we created a technical advisory board which are again leaders, which are again the companies that are prominent in the end user space and contributing and driving the direction across that board. So the review and approve, approve reference architectures. You know, hey, what should we do when we are deploying a cloud native deployment? Like what should technology landscape look like? They facilitate end user feedback to projects. Like if a project has a certain need and a requirement, how do you communicate back that into the project? And then improve visibility and adoption of CNCF projects. From a personal example, I can talk about during my time at Apple, for example, we created a CNCF radar inside the company and we were providing guidance to different teams within Apple on what CNCF project, what stage of maturity they are and how do you adapt them. That was very helpful. So getting back to the role of the foundation, you know, the overall mission is to make cloud computing ubiquitous. That's sort of the fundamental. And in that sense, the governing board, the TOC, the end user technical advisory board, the CNCF staff, all of that work towards to drive global awareness and adoption. And cloud native is very common these days, but there are still a lot of customers, a lot of companies that are on the beginning of their journey, that are just still ramping up on their journey. So that's where we can provide that education. And then there are customers who are at a very far extreme end of pushing the envelope of cloud native. So how do we cater to that entire community, make sure it works for them? The stewardship of the community and the ecosystem. And it's a lot about technology, but it's a lot about people as well. So how do we handle all of that in entirety? One of the biggest advantages of any open source foundation is neutrality. No one company kind of owns a copyright or the IP or the trademark. When Kubernetes came to CNCF, it becomes CNCF copyright. It's not no longer a Google copyright. And that really allowed everybody else to kind of contribute because now the fear is not there that that vendor is going to define and guide the roadmap. So that's the philosophy. Open ecosystem creates a equitable playground for everybody to compete, make the spy bigger, and have a piece. I mean, if you think about all the managed Kubernetes services that are happening, that's sort of how it's working. The vendors are generating revenue out of it. They're funding it back into the community and it kind of creates a positive feedback cycle. Events, trademark branding, we can go on and on. I think that's the end of my slide. And with that, thank you for people who are coming in. What I would maybe take a minute from each governing board member, and I'm putting them on the spot, they haven't been prepped for this. Talk about what's on the top of your mind when you are in the governing board meeting. What are you thinking about that where we should take the foundation? Maybe take a minute and that gives people some context. And then I would open it up for any Q&A. And for people who want to ask a question, we got a mic in the middle of the aisle. So please walk over there. And for people who are like, this is all getting recorded. So let's make sure the questions are clearly heard. If not, then the panelists can repeat it. So take a minute on what's on the top of your mind when you are in the governing board meeting or strategy meeting or any of that. Maybe let's start with Emily on the other side this time. Way to put me on the spot. Thanks, Rune. So when I'm in governing board meetings or when I'm preparing for them, my biggest concern is ensuring that technical community interests are appropriately represented to governing board members. We have had a lot of feedback in the past both from community members as well as governing board members that they're not exactly clear what it is that the TOC is doing or why we're doing certain things. So what my job is to ensure that the governing board is well informed on where the TOC is headed, any potential fires that might be headed their way if we're aware of what they are, but also just keeping them informed on things that we're hearing about projects, potential issues that are coming up, ensuring projects have appropriate resources. For example, we have a lack of contributors within the ecosystem today, both within projects as well as within technical advisory groups. So trying to identify strategies that the governing board can take to improve that situation for the entire ecosystem. Those are kinds of things that I think about. I think it's going to be no surprise here, but over the period that the CNCF has been in existence, I think open source has only grown more and more important in the way the world operates. And I think we have a really unique opportunity to set things in motion. Open source itself is evolving around the world. And I think we've built a great platform with the team here that we have and the ecosystem of projects to build a really solid foundation to take that forward. So I think about, you know, as we have the CNCF today, how do we continue to evolve open source in the ecosystem, in the market place around the world? Because it's here to stay. It's an operational model that many people are utilizing open source. I think it's something like 90% of all companies are using open source and all their code. So we really have a duty to steward open source. And I think, you know, keynotes are all about AI. How are we going to take what we've built here and what we've learnt from the last 10 years of Kubernetes and make that more durable? Because I think open source is going to play a very big role in the development of AI and the development of humanity. So I see a moment here where, you know, I was in the room when the CNCF was announced. Craig was on stage in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. And now I look back at that moment of being transitional to that kind of innovation that happened. What are we going to do now as AI is coming up and what is the next moment of innovation? And I think open source is going to be at the heart of that. So I look to this team, this community, this ecosystem of projects as, what have we learnt here? What can we take from here and how do we continue to evolve? So I'm very interested in that kind of role and how we continue to evolve open source. I think that's going to become increasingly important in the years to come. Okay. I guess, you know, in my role as a Governing Board member, I think of really two things. One, I think of, you know, you do not need a foundation to be open source. Open source is only the license. You can have a very, very successful open source project that is not in a foundation. A foundation has a very specific role to play. And I'm always thinking about, are we playing that role well? Are we providing the things the projects need to make it worth their time? You know, they want to be here. They want to come. They're getting what they need out of being a foundation because that's a choice. You don't have to move your project to a foundation. So that's one thing I'm always thinking about. The other thing I'm always thinking about are the contributors. Because if they walk away from those projects, if those projects are not well maintained and sustained, and that only happens because of contributors, then we have nothing. So I'm always thinking about, are the programs we're offering, are the things we're designing, are the strategies we're taking serving contributors, and are they incentivizing projects to want to be here and to want to stay here? Being a part of the end user company and user interest is always a top priority for me. And how do we amplify their voices? And user tab establishment has been a great initiative. Looking forward to engage more with them as a part of the GB and to echo to what Anne said, existing project sustainability and health in the long run is very important. How do we maintain them? How do we keep the maintainers? How do we engage new maintainers is a very important thing to think about. So I think when you look at what the governing board's role is and what we do, part of being a good governing board member and serving on the governing board is being an active listener of the issues, whether it's legal issues or it's project issues or different things that are coming up and helping to contribute from our own experience or from our company experience to help make those things better for the projects and for the audience. And we all bring our own unique perspective in terms of stuff which we care about and we're interested in. And one of the things which I'm very passionate about, I know Arun is as well is education, education of kids and cloud native technologists that they adopt Kubernetes, they adopt a lot of the graduated projects and incubating projects coming out of us. And one of the things we formed actually it was a bunch of the governing board members who kicked this off was CNCF Kids Day. And what CNCF Kids Day is that's a chance for us to engage, get local kids to come and learn. We're getting a wider variety of kids a more diverse audience folks who normally wouldn't be exposed to technology to be able to learn and practice in a setting and if you're in the keynotes this morning you saw one of the outputs of the CNCF Kids Day program which was the Fippies AI Friends book so that's release.cubecon we're actually using it for a workshop this Saturday so that's the CNCF Kids Day date and I'm going to put them on the spot but we actually have the author and the illustrator in the audience so if you wouldn't mind to stand up Cassandra and Roman give them a big round of applause. So the book actually exists I'm holding it up we're not just making up stuff which isn't written yet so this book teaches kids a little bit about AIML technologies if you all are familiar with the scratch program it's like block coding so there's a workshop in the book where the kids can do scratch on a familiar platform and we have some AIML integrations so one of the pages has a scanning page you hold it up to the camera and you can train your own image recognition model alright thank you so like I think we all bring our own perspective we all kind of bring unique things to the governing board and hopefully this is empowering the next generation of native technologists yeah that's great so there's pros and cons to being near the end of the queue it's you've had more time to think about it but a lot of the things you thought were already said so for me whenever I'm participating on the governing board I'm really trying to wear two different hats at the same time one you know I am representing a vendor so I do want to make sure as was already pointed out that you can have a successful open source project without the foundation so we want to make sure that we truly are adding value and it's worth joining and renewing and continuing to spend your time which is more important than anything with the CNCF so that's always very top of mind on that side but as an open source advocate enthusiast participant for basically my entire career I want to also make sure that the end users are well represented and we're providing value to that side of the community as well so try to look at things through both lenses and then participate where I can I'll agree as it gets tough as you move down the line to kind of come up with something new but we're all here because we care and that we believe in the mission of the cloud native community to do what we're doing and to bring open source to the world when the part of that is ensuring that the continued healthy operation of the foundation and sustainable operation of the foundation is oversight and feedback and that's what I'm caring about in particular is making sure that the voice of the maintainers, the voice of the people who are working on these projects day to day is reflected in the governing board and in its decisions as well as giving insight into why the governing board is doing what it's doing back to the community and back to those maintainers. I'm thinking what to say. A lot of listening actually on my side particularly and I do talk to several governing board members quite regularly I talk to the technical folks and I talk to them and I talk to them and I talk to them regularly project leads quite regularly and I also try to push the foundation to go try out new things like Stephen was talking about the kids day that was literally just a conversation I don't know one of the valenci I believe in a bus drive we were going back from the governing board dinner we were going to do a hackathon effort in partnership with the united nation and that hackathon is happening right now a lot of my time also gets focused working with the CNCFT extremely cooperative in terms of not just doing things but how do we streamline it better so that we could be more efficient and once it's automated get the heck out of the way and do more fun things challenges you know, challenges, tell us keep us honest on what can we do better what can we do different to make it more impactful and actually we will open it up for any question on anything CNCF or in life in general please stand up to the mic and let's get the party going let's see who's going to be the first penguin all right so I'm just going to ask it I have my own answers I think everybody in the room might have their own answers but it's useful to hear it from the governing board elevator pitch you're pitching the CNCF the foundation to a project what does the CNCF do for a project the gifts and the gets you mean yeah Emily you want to take a shot when we all have opinions we can all share so at a minimum the CNCF we have a large set of services to open source projects within the foundation to include licensing review some level of infrastructure support some marketing and branding opportunities at the event depending on their maturity level and then there's a myriad of other services it really depends on the project where it's at in their maturity also the nature of the project itself not all projects that come into the foundation they well experience that of software engineers running things behind the scenes so they rely on CNCF staff to support them through managing an open source project in some cases they also look to the technical advisory groups for some of that but generally that's just the CNCF specific services that are provided a lot of what I hear from projects that they get out of the CNCF is the sense of community and the hope that they can increase their contributor base that's the effort on their part and I think that's a lot of the messaging that's lost it's a lot of give and take between both bodies between the contributors and the community in CNCF as well as the projects themselves yeah very much agree and I think also as a project especially if you're growing rapidly the coding portion, the getting contributors all super fun the compliance, the legal, the governance maybe you have a little less expertise there that's not what excites you so let me ask the question back do you think CNCF gives and gets are clearly documented and known or do you think we can do a better job of that like if you were to go contribute a project, if you were to think about a foundation do you think those gives and gets are clearly documented? I think there may be implicitly understood but they're probably not officially documented probably that's a good opportunity for us to take a look into it and Paige so let's take an AR to document our gives and gets of CNCF clearly thank you a few weeks ago LinkerD made an announcement about the new releases being owned by the vendor community going forward and there's been some public discussion from the TOC and community members from this what's the GB's thoughts as a yeah as a TOC chair let's see what's the opinion so the TOC is actually already commented on the LinkerD issue but I believe the question is for the broader governing board proper regarding whether or not the existing criteria and expectations of CNCF projects are sustainable moving forward in light that we have many open source projects that have a single vendor driving most of the contributions so I think that is a good question for the governing board to consider given especially that the TOC is particularly already weighed in on LinkerD and we recently modified the moving levels criteria for incubation and graduation to help offset some of the conditions that could arise that cause changes like that to occur within projects the open source community is driven by volunteers and as such we can't force anybody to necessarily do anything but what we can do is ensure that expectations are clearly aligned that when somebody comes to a CNCF project in a graduated status what can they expect from that project and what is the consistent expectation between projects sometimes there can be assumptions that because it is labeled as this it should be this and that expectation can sometimes be misaligned throughout the community and in the case of LinkerD I think that it is something that the community, like the broad community expects that there will be releases done because that's what that community did, that's what many other projects and communities do within the CNCF and I do think there can be a better, clear expectation both ways, both from the community and to the projects of if you are at a CNCF a graduated level, an incubating level, a sandbox level what is the community expecting of you and what are we expecting of the project to kind of figure out how it's going to do and this would be the same regardless of whether you have one single vendor that is doing the majority of the contributions to a project that is the first multi-vendor project so I think assessment also should be ongoing not just when moving levels the annual review process is as important for graduated projects as for sandbox and incubating I think maintainer diversity is super important that's what gets the project thriving and that's what keeps the project relevant to a broad range of interest, that's super critical I think the question that I ask is are those expectations documented are those expectations clear, are those transparent or is that happening behind the scene if that is happening behind the scene that is not correct but if those are documented and those are made very clear that this is how the project is going to go and we are applying those expectations in a consistent manner across the project that's what we strive for and the point being they being transparent so if you could make a comment on that no it doesn't make sense, why it doesn't make sense let's tell us about it so having that dialogue is clear I was just going to comment just one thing I think it's always this listening to the community and responding so there's what's written and then there's the state of culture and expectation that's out there in the community and we always need to listen and I think a lot of the chat has been about maybe that expectation wasn't written but we have to respond to that and I don't suspect that this will be the last time happening but to piggyback on what Chris said a lot of the justification I heard around the decision is the cost to do releases was quite high and as Christoph said there's a bunch of volunteers volunteering time probably outside of their day jobs to make that happen and for that project they are entitled to make a decision that that maybe is not worth it for them but as Christoph said we don't dictate at that level what they must and must not do if they're volunteering their time but I think we just need to listen to the community and understand what the expectations are and then write them into written law I think there's a lot of expectation that we've written everything down from the start but it's an ebb and flow as we're all on this journey together to write it's kind of precedence and written and it's a mix of both and then we're going to have to iterate so I suspect there'll be other things in the future that we'll have to make decisions about as we go what I do like is there's we should always operate with open and transparent decision making and discussion and I always more of a heads up is better because then we can talk through it and not respond reactively because those situations are always far more challenging than they need to be had there been more opportunity so I think we need to continue those kind of conversations and then we can make decisions, that's all Tim, go ahead so far we've talked a fair amount about community and contribution, sustainability and the word volunteers has been mentioned a number of times I'd be curious to hear especially from Steven and also Jeremy as the gold member and silver member reps we've had this tremendous growth we're about 30 gold members it's too curious about your opinions too but I'm curious if you could talk about if or to what extent you're able to go back to these member companies and try to drive more contribution participation so it's less volunteer driven and we have more sustainability through the member corporations as well yeah and I think that's that's a great question so when you look at the CNCF and a lot of the contributing companies there's different things that companies bring and different value that they bring to the CNCF organization and I think even within those organizations there's different dynamics about how you get folks more involved in the CNCF so for example in the keynotes today they talked a bit about the AML working group and the work which is going on there and there's a lot of different companies contributing, there's a lot of active contributions which are technical in nature which is not directly contributing to a project but it contributes to the ecosystem, it helps to enable a pipeline of projects, it helps to to build out the requirements for how we need to move forward in the AML space so I think that some of those contributions are coming from a lot of the different companies which are involved for the engineering contributions I think I'll speak personally from a a J-prog perspective the discussion internally is always about you know when we're contributing like a full time headcount or an FTE to a project how does that contribute to things which also align with business priorities and often you can make that case internally if it's going to help with efficiency of releases if it's a critical open source project which your customers rely upon so you need to have that engagement on the project and I think that as representatives who represent our companies or represent the other member companies we should be advocating more for stakeholders to make those arguments internally and get more folks involved but it's very difficult to mandate or make that a criteria for folks to sponsor and to support the CNCF because there's a wide variety of different types of contributions other than just supplying FTEs to open source projects I don't know Tim if I have an answer exactly too and I know you said platinum members should stand down but I'll go back to my thoughts it's been interesting to me the last couple of cube cons these cycles we've gone through we're hitting in terms of attendees 10s, 11, 12,000 people and then you go to the project contribution sessions to what you're alluding to and everybody's desperate for contributors and so I think that just highlights this challenge we have of there are 12,000 people here and it seems we have missed educating and spreading a little bit about how the open source system works compared to you're buying licensed software off the shelf there is sort of this unwritten expectation about your user you probably need to help with the contribution a little bit we seem to have missed something there I think we've also maybe missed a little bit of really incentivizing the creation of net new things rather than putting those resources behind feature extension or other core maintenance in existing things so I think that's a question for the group to really think about and consider as a community how do we sustain what we already have and how do we create the incentive structures to make that happen one thought for me on that is when folks are contributing to projects it's a lot easier to justify internally to your company if you're like my work is attached to this feature and that feature enables something in my company very short kind of chain to justify it gets tougher when there's more links in that chain between the action that's being taken by somebody working for your company and the value that it's bringing and going back to like even talk about like linker D or like a release process a release process in itself is not like a feature but it is a critical path thing if you want the artifact at the end the company is understanding that when you're contributing you're not just contributing because I want this feature I want this thing in my project contributing is an investment into the project and investment into the long term sustainability so even providing folks who can do some of that non-feature work to do things like serve on a release team to go and do bug triage to go and do the unsung work in a community to enable these processes even though there might be more links in the chain between that contribution and the actual value it's delivering to your company it's still like a critical investment in the long term sustainability of that project and to make sure that project still exists years from now in a healthy way for whatever your enterprise needs are one thing I'll just add it wasn't immediately clear if you meant to be advocating within our own single organization how we can contribute more or how we can get other organizations of similar size or broader I was going to say I think we could do a better job of sharing some of our internal knowledge of how we've been effective at advocating internally because it can sometimes be difficult but we could do a better job for the latter as well so we have a contributor summit here which has been very useful for people who are deeply involved it would be super helpful if you could have a report at the end of it if you could have projects at risk an area to contribute for both new and existing contributors something that we can circulate within our companies and bring attention to an opportunity that I see for us like the way we are doing this town hall we have started doing this town halls for the last couple of years where we just reach out to the gold members and the silver members and we tell them what's really happening at KubeCon within GB so maybe an opportunity for us is to go to Merge Program where we guide developers on how to become a contributor send their first pull request there's a structured program maybe we can engage that as part of the GB and the silver town hall decks and see if we can spread the word around that to Tim's point at least raise the awareness that's step one and then see what the interest is after that I will have a comment to this one and I've got the combo question so sorry for the line behind me the contributor summit somebody mentioned it it's still a little bit of exclusive and hidden event so it's not listed for example in the main page of KubeCon if you are going to KubeCon and you just Google KubeCon you will not know that there is a contributor summit so people just do not wonder to the contributor summit I think that is a little bit of an issue here but any comments to that? I don't know if you have a comment on that so far so the contributor summit is designed to be a little bit of a closed-door summit for contributors so that there is a safe space for those contributors to talk about some of these things internally the bar to attend the contributor summit is very low the main requirement like for the Kubernetes contributor summit in particular is your Kubernetes org member so it is a very low bar we invite anybody who has contributed to Kubernetes or is interested in contributing Kubernetes to go and look because again it is a very low bar but it is designed to be a closed-door event so that there are spaces for contributors to talk basically have those honest conversations in person about what the project needs are what can we do to strategize around getting those needs met and the like I wonder if there is an opportunity for us to do like a one-on-one track at a future KubeCon where we bring these people on where the project maintainers could come up I don't know if there is something like that that exists the project maintainers come up with their requests and we do the matchmaking we do a room actually I'll invite anybody who is interested in understanding where they might want to contribute understanding even from a company perspective if you have engineers working for you if you have people who are interested in contributing working for you we have a signet and greet meet the contributors I think it's what it's called this year just to have a more clear thing in the schedule but we do have a session where there will be tables with all the different folks that are working on different areas of the Kubernetes project itself for other projects that are non-Kubernetes I believe there's contrib fast dates and stuff in the calendar all throughout the week so if you have folks that are interested or you have people working for you that you want to get information about what is the best way to work with their efforts be best used definitely come and talk to us it's on the schedule we're happy to talk to you about it okay thanks so the combo question so every project secretly would like to be a CNCF project so my question to you what is the secret of CNCF compared to other foundations so why projects are moving what is the secret of CNCF what is that you do better than other foundation or what is your what is your secret so that would be one question the other question is like isn't the size of CNCF or the size of the foundation is or is it healthy for the ecosystem in general so isn't I will say that as a reminder the mission of the CNCF is to make cloud native ubiquitous which means we're already going to be probably one of the largest foundations I believe the term letting a thousand flowers bloom has been commonly used and that has been always one of the intents behind CNCF is to bring in as many projects that are utilizing cloud native design principles practices architectures methodologies so we're always going to be designed to be big and I would say we don't really have a secret if you're looking it's the community and it's the vibrancy associated with that a lot of our projects come into the foundation because of the popularity the awareness the opportunities are bound here if you know how to capitalize on how the CNCF works a lot of projects that are extremely successful Kubernetes has a ton of special interest groups they have a lot of attention they have thousands of contributors and some projects will never see that scale but they are successful in their own right and it's a lot in part because of the individual contributors that spend hours every day working on those projects showing up to meetings doing the work that nobody else wants to do that's what's been making us successful is the heroes of the community that often go unsung and those are the same individuals that we are starting to lose within the ecosystem as Anne was saying earlier like you because you don't need a foundation to have an open source project and to have a successful open source project it's important to us to keep looking at that exact question of like why should somebody why should a company why should individuals, why should they choose to come to our foundation and to have our foundation be the home for their open source project what is the value you're getting out of that and to me one of the most powerful things that I see there is that we create a safe inclusive open space for people to contribute so that people are enthusiastic about contributing like it is when you come into a community and it's like oh actually I get to work with intelligent people from across the industry who are open willing to share their knowledge willing to share their expertise like that is empowering for folks so creating that space has been really important but it's always something that we need to keep revisiting to ensure that the foundation is meeting the needs of the projects in creating that space for projects to be successful and it is something that I would say you know while we can always do better and we should be looking to improve we've done at least a decently successful job because projects do look to the CNCF as far as that's where I want to be because that's the kind of community I want for my project I would just say just summarize community the secret sources community I think the support for the projects whatever they need the support the big thing whether it's you know if you graduated getting security audits done there's a whole suite of services that we do to support projects and then finally I think it's we are very mature in our organization and processes they're documented well documented they're discoverable so onboard you can onboard yourself and I think that's really speaks to the maturity of the organization the TOC have done a fantastic job making it very discoverable and you can navigate the process on your own that speaks to a very organized and mature foundation so I think that's the last piece of the secret source of the CNCF I would say having an agency over your intention is very important so I became in addition to being CNCF chair I'm also the chair for the open SSF governing board and these two are the largest foundations and if we think about there's a lot of overlap in terms of tax security work that is happening here versus what is happening in open SSF so one of the things that I work with the governing board is how can we have like not be in our silo that whatever is being worked upon in tax security how could that work better with open SSF you heard the message from Ibrahim this morning on LFAI and data so if cloud native and AI has to work together it cannot be just within CNCF it's got to work with the LFAI and data so it has it has grown big because of all the reasons but we are having that intention and desire to work with other foundations so that we lift the entire ecosystem up along with us thank you hello my name is Christian Klein I'm from LSS a CNCF silver member and I'm mostly passionate about the intersection of legal and tech anybody else out here I want to thank you very much for all the great work that you're doing and especially that thing there with the licensing trademarks and license exceptions I have actually read those documents and I find them really great because as a product owner for a community distribution that kind of allows me to cut my bills of materials as oh I got in a CNCF project I trust these people they know how to deal with these things I don't need to investigate further on the other hand I want to say that especially Europe the legal landscape has become messier it seems like in the age of AI it's not only technologists and platform engineers but also politicians who want to stay relevant and I noticed for example this morning a little bit of a I found it a bit surprising that although AI was very basically every slide was with AI this morning but there was no discussion about AI so like I said I found it a bit surprising so I was wondering where does the CNCF sees itself when it comes to legal and tech does it want to just deal with issues that you're already dealing with or do you in the future want to bridge let's say what society at large needs with what technologies find fun to do let me just make a quick comment on this and I'll let other folks chime in but I think we actually spent a lot of time on legal issues in the governing board which was here earlier actually was the one who briefed us on a lot of the copyright and trademark issues on AI code coming in to CNCF projects I think that were regularly briefed on legislation laws which are impacting the ability for projects based on open source licenses and other things related to AI and so I would say that that is one of the roles of the governing board is to help the the larger CNCF organization to make informed decisions that are going to support the projects based on the ever-changing legal and technical landscape I'll be quick with some information clarification about the CNCF and its legal positions but everyone I was also noticing the time and we have quite a queue if you can help us stay we had 90 minutes we have 40 more minutes oh I thought we had 10 okay yes settle in so for information the Linux foundation is registered in the United States and the United States has multiple tax codes for how it deals with nonprofit registrations the type of nonprofit registration it has is one where you're only allowed about 15% of time spent which is ill-defined term but also I'm not anybody's lawyer I'm not a lawyer but I'm definitely not your lawyer so you have to be very careful in this US registration about how much time you're spending dealing with essentially lobbying types of things not allowed to do lobbying activities so I think we have to any organization in that registration has to be careful where they pick and choose how am I going to spend that time that I'm allotted I think for a lot of open source foundations the last 18 months their focus has been on the EU CRA instead of the EU AI act yes yes but the interesting part is the and for folks who aren't aware the EU CRA is the cyber resilience act and it's really focused on cyber security but what became very interesting to the open source community were a couple lines in one particular article that talked about how do these conditions apply to open source projects and how do we define them and they came up with something called an open source steward and as most people are picking apart this law and figuring out how this is going to apply to me it seems to hint that foundations are going to be classified as open source stewards so that's an interesting journey we'll get to go down the interesting thing about the EU AI act is that it both those are pulling from the EU's same definition of product liability to define who is responsible for what in these situations so I completely agree with you that we need to be paying equal attention to the AI act because it's going to have a very similar take on what is the responsibility who is responsible for an open source something when it comes to these conditions that we want to put and these regulations we want to put on AI I will also say that the thing is it wouldn't affect the CNCF alone it would affect anybody involved in open source because it's broad sweeping so I think there's other groups like the OSI just started up a new policy group to try and really bring together how are we a unified body rather than 100 individual foundations giving feedback to regulators I know some EU regulator feedback that was given at FOSDEM was this is really difficult for us as regulators to navigate can you all just show about in one unified front and people say that's not how open source works but point taken that it was very difficult for them to figure out how do I get how do I talk to somebody who is open source and I apologize that a room told me I had 90 minutes I got on my soapbox but does that kind of acknowledge your question enough yeah just to make sure I understood the whole message correct is it correct to say like well it's like the CNCF doesn't really have a choice they will be kind of forced into having the discussion with politicians I think it's probably correct whether they want to or not that there's avenues that you know it's probably because the projects will be impacted by how these regulations are defined there's avenues to figure out where do we appropriately give our feedback where do we not I think for folks as member companies there's also multiple other avenues including your own ability to give feedback and other existing groups like the OSI to also channel those things too maybe I'll add to this you know as Ann said it's not just a CNCF problem and if you think about the broader Linux foundation there are a thousand plus projects multiple foundations over there and I know Jim Zamlin talks to all of these political bodies to kind of put the feedback back out there Mike Dolan who's the SVP and legal counsel for LF you know they are in regular dialogues over there it's just that the AI act does not impact CNCF directly by itself but as that engagement is going to be more oh yes it does a rune that has not been discussed in the legal committee let's say that way for now so eventually yes it will come to it thank you hey Paris as of today outside of projects needing more contributors and maintainers what are some of the biggest risks to CNCF as a whole and its ecosystem and how can the community help I think one of the most obvious risks right now is security of open source and I think that's a big one that we can lead the industry in and we have foundations that are setting the standards on how to secure these things but the realisation I think Christoph was saying there's so much open source even in proprietary code that whether you want to put your head in the sand and not look at those dependencies it's sooner or later going to come back home to so I think just I think we have a really interesting position right now where if we come up with ways to transparently secure distribute open source software I think we could lead the industry with that through open source so I think that's a really big risk right now to open source software and how it's delivered because I think we have a fantastic worldwide community and we can solve this problem together and I think solving it is the best way to do it in the security way so I just think we have a really big opportunity and burden on our shoulders to solve that and show that we know how to solve this problem so for me it's security and kind of the cyber security landscape as it's evolving right now I think that's a big challenge that we need to face as a community I'll just add to Lockheed's point quickly which I totally agree that security is a huge risk area and I think there's a huge potential risk which we're all stepping into which is obviously there's all this momentum around AML and AML workloads running on Kubernetes and that has become a very large attack surface which hackers attackers actually a lot of researchers are exploring for potential attacks as well and it opens up a whole bunch of different vectors to attack open source projects, open source models do exploits which are quite dangerous and quite they don't follow the standard security model which we're used to for securing open source projects so I will say something completely opposite to a security person I'm going to say security toil is one of the biggest risks in open source there are a lot of best practices that have been defined for projects to adopt there is a lot of tooling that has been made available for projects to take advantage of but they all suffer from the same fundamental problem is that we are not doing security effectively or efficiently enough for open source and what I mean to say is the open SSF has the score cards project it is a highly opinionated perspective on how open source projects should be doing security without consideration that there are many different ways that a security control or requirement can be met by a given project that is not automatic or automatable in determining their compliance with that and your risk is not the same as my risk is not the same as somebody else's risk as an open source project so we need to do a better job of making sure that the security requirements and expectations we are imposing on open source projects are actually realistic and achievable and move the needle in the right direction so that's my caveat on that but one of the other risks that I think exist with an open source is accountability and open decisions there has been an interesting shift in the past decade or so where there are some projects that have been moving more and more decisions behind closed stores we're not seeing the results of the decisions and we're certainly not seeing the justification that went into why that decision was being made just the fact that something occurred and the project has changed direction we need to be more accountable in the decisions that are being made and the impact that they have on the community members as well as the adopters of those projects and they need to be documented publicly in a manner that's discoverable so that everybody can follow up after the fact reason about why the decision was made and have a path to overturn it if necessary that those conditions and factors have been changed yeah I'll put my security soap box when I talk about the economy I think to me that's the kind of the thing on my mind right now it's very pragmatic but just looking at the macro economic environment we think about we hear stories of folks being like I didn't get to travel approval at my company to come to KubeCon and you think about okay you're in a two-year period where your manager says to you you get one conference pass this year and here's the responsibilities of your job are they going to come to KubeCon are they going to come to something else does that affect their contribution time and you know these things are all cycles and so in a couple years time we'll probably be back in a place where the manager says okay you get four tickets this year where are you going so how do we keep that person engaged and involved and giving them what they need so when things come back around you know they're still a part of this community feel disconnected they don't feel like they've you know been disconnected for three years and now they're coming back in so I think that's just for a lot of folks this is probably the first time in their open source journey or time that we've been through a slightly macro economic decline and so we're going to learn how to get through that together if I can kind of riff off both Lucky and Ann I'd say that one of the biggest kind of risks as you see as the economy shifts as companies are taking a look at their investments in open source and figuring out what is the right level for us to invest into open source and as projects like again coming from the Kubernetes the project itself as some of the development and some of the feature development maybe slows from what it was a few years ago and the technology kind of shifts in new areas like AI I can see I can already see it in the landscape our companies are like oh well we're going to invest last whether that's people whether it's travel to conferences whether it's just having the project be visible and that project is something they care about a little bit less because their focus is over here and as focus shifts onto new things a lot of the other projects that we built and things like Kubernetes are becoming more boring they're becoming more stable, they're becoming more ubiquitous we just assume that Kubernetes will always be there we assume that some of these backbone projects that we build on top of will always be there and ensuring that companies recognize that no actually that still needs sustaining that still needs money still needs investment still needs people it needs all these things in order to continue for all these other great things that you want to build to succeed if you forget about it then it becomes that XKCD where you have the open SSL this tiny little thing in here and everybody just forgets about it because they assume that it's going to be there and it doesn't get the care and attention that it needs I think that was my my concern was that there's a lot of money shifting from the boring going to the green field AI and that's kind of my concern as well I think one thing that runs in my head is go back to the first Kubecon nobody would have ever guessed from 500 people will be 12,000 people here right go out a decade 30,000 do we have the processes set up in a way that we can scale CNCF has 160 odd projects right now more so do we want to get to 500 projects are we set up in that sense is the TOC staff those are my questions how do we scale are we set up to scale do we see what 11 members right now or 9 is that the right size should we have more should we get more people to Emily so that she can walk them around and approve more projects do we have enough funds in CNCF I think those are the things that I think about like 5 years out, 3 years out if from 180 we go to 250 do we have enough funds like couple of years ago what if that crisis around Kubernetes infra what if that crisis something else is boiling up that happens again in 2 years are we able to see those signs ahead of time that's sort of where at least my head is those are the places if people can think about give us feedback this is what needs to be fundamentally different or shift to make CNCF scale in 3 years, 5 years so maybe we need TOC GPT good for the session so my question is basically around diversity and yes I can see a lot of things being done to improve diversity of can you get closer to the mic my question is basically around diversity I can see a lot of things being done to improve diversity to cater for different needs well I'm not so sure how to ask the question but I'm going to go around so talk about a lot of things and you can pick the question out of that I come from a region where I came from Nigeria to attend CNCF and basically chat and and basically that was the reason for me coming here and I my colleague that we came together almost they make videos and what's not right and coming here I can see there is a lot of there are a lot of different people different people from different places but I guess maybe because it's cubecon Europe then it's very European centric so I'm talking about region now not race or background or gender or what's not right not diversity on those terms but diversity on the region basically and I think of myself and the region where I come from and I see okay what is it that we can contribute right the cloud native technologies are global they're not they're not we consume a lot from cloud native we consume a lot from most of the vendors that are here I think the last time I was at a conference I mentioned that most of the vendors most of the sponsors are vendors to my organization but apart from the ones that look at trainers and whatnot so we consume a lot but I see the fact that it's a lot more difficult for us to not just be consumers for us to contribute back and to music contribute back right and for example I'm here on a corporate attendee right because I work in a corporate organization but the truth is that even though the organization is a corporate organization the corporate fee is actually high because of exchange rate and what's not right so there are basically what I'm trying to say is there is a lot of efforts to improve the diversity but there are nuances in regional diversity that I think there should be a lot more I look at the members of the governing council and I'm going to make a wild assumption I would most likely be wrong but I doubt if there is anyone on the council representing I don't know whether global south is the right generic term to use but people that like regions that are not well the region that I can say I'm from right and I honestly believe representation helps with diversity the reason why I'm able to come and give this perspective is because I'm here without me being present I wouldn't be able to represent this perspective and I understand that we're all we're all it wasn't that easy like our perspective and our experience our experiences and our lived experiences shape our perspective and the decisions we would make so if there are more people more people present then you would have a more diverse array of opinions and be able to come up with decisions that help bring everyone together the last point I want to make is just looking at the technology ecosystem and the kind of talents we have and I was speaking with I was at one of the co-located events yesterday and someone was there were two people on stage giving and making a presentation about Agus CD and a lot of what they were doing were things that we have done or we've played around with and I told them like these things aren't new to us like we have a scale we have a challenge we have used these technologies to the point where some of these things that people on stage talk about are not new to us but for some reason were not even the points weren't even considering submitting a talk I'll have some talk before but but again my point right like there is because of the way things are right it's easier for us to feel again like consumers rather than contributors and I believe there's a lot for us to contribute but to the point of looking at the technical expertise that we have the expertise I have on my team there is a lot that I can get my team to contribute if it's easier to do that there is a lot I can convince my organization to contribute if it's easier for them to do that but because of the way things are then it's I think I've said this again it's easier for us to be consumers rather than contributors sorry that's my so many chance thank you we have an amazing technical advisory group called contributors strategy looks like many points that you've just brought up would be very much worth bringing to the discussion there so we can all collaborate and see what can be done to improve the experience there are also several scholarships that CNCF provides for maintenance and there's also diversity scholarship all the information is available on the website and if you ever need to talk to any of us we're also available please feel free to Slack or email us if you need to follow up so I'm going to go a little bit deeper than Alina did tag contributor strategy is one of the technical advisory groups who is designed to facilitate contributions to cloud native projects as well as other technical advisory groups working groups other functions within CNCF but they have limited resources available to them they too need contributors to show up and point out problems within the ecosystem and not only point them out but come up and provide ideas and recommendations for how to resolve them that is how the deaf and hard unhearing working group got started within tag contributor strategy it was organized a gap in the ecosystem and they started identifying opportunities and met with individuals to pull together a group and because of that we've actually increased accessibility within kubecon conferences so that is one opportunity but it does require individuals to show up there are also KCD or Kubernetes community days those are regional events that any individual in the ecosystem can put on with assistance from a CNCF and there are a lot of them here they get a new cohort in the fall I believe so those are excellent opportunities to get specific regional or diversity oriented activities and individuals interested in that space to get together and not only talk about the technology but talk about community building opportunities to expand the reach because you're right this foundation and our projects are only reflective of the individuals that are currently present and quite frankly we have significantly more adopters outside of the individuals that are represented either on stage or even in the audience here today and we should be doing better and reaching out to them but we can only do that when we know where they are and they are interested in being equal participants in that advancement there are plenty of other groups activities there is contribfest that goes on during kubecon for getting more contributors into the project specifically we're looking for technical contributions that way that's one area showing up to public meetings you don't necessarily need to be an active participant in any of the tags or even on the TOC to join any of our calls you can listen in you can comment on issues you can join our discussions on our repo any of those things but we are actively seeking individuals that are willing to lead and champion a lot of these efforts because there's only a few of us that have the time and capacity to dedicate to do those and we need to expand that footprint beyond what's currently represented here on stage I just wanted to share an experience I was able to witness as part of the community and I think the growth of the developer community in India so back in the day there were very few Indian contributors to Kubernetes and the KCDs really facilitated the formation of community groups inside India so I was able to witness that from afar and see all these KCDs springing up into India and that really united a bunch of community members in that place to the point where they have their own KubeCon now starting this year so I would say through KCDs you have a really great analog to connect with folks in your community and have it led by community members and representatives from those countries and build kind of that really connect community and that grows into something much bigger than what it started but and the outcome for Kubernetes if we had many releases led by developers based out of India for many years now so it's been great I remember back when I started in Kubernetes that was kind of a dream for those developers to have better representation from the Indian developer community so I think you mentioned from Nigeria right you probably have that equal opportunity through those processes where people don't have to travel or ask their company for a lot of money do that in the cities in Nigeria and from that build these really large communities to the point where that may even be an option I'm sure you have I've worked with a lot of folks in the community that are from Nigeria as well not on the stage here today but I know that you have a very vibrant developer community in a very technical community in that area so really excited to have you join that and I really hope through those processes that you feel like you can be part of the community because we'd love to have you all as part of this community and we will be happy to connect you to any Kube Day organisers there's a Kube Day in Japan that happens for the very first time this year and it's a great achievement for the community in the Asia we got 15 more minutes any questions? of course Paris always has questions real or perceived or I'm sorry real or not there is a perception that when member companies join and pay the CNCF that they are also contributing because they feel like the sale with the CNCF is that the CNCF helps with sustainability of projects so when projects are going through a crisis period I usually hear a lot of what do we pay the CNCF for and how can we as a community and then you as the board help with a alignment there for people to really understand and this kind of goes back to one of the first questions that was asked with how can we match really in a more concrete way what CNCF provides and doesn't provide I think that's the key there for instance CNCF does not provide maintainers and necessarily not even fellowships or something like the Rust foundation does so yeah just wanted to hear your ideas there so I've heard that as well and I know that there have been discussions around whether or not the CNCF could be employing individuals part-time or full-time to serve in some capacity on projects either as a security team or as a maintainer and it's a slippery slope because as soon as we start providing that there's an expectation that it will always happen if you give free sandwiches every day for lunch for a week people are going to come back the next week and ask where's the free sandwiches and for us we need to do a better job because we're going to have a lot of expectations that when you are a member of the foundation part of that membership fee covers the base costs of where things currently exist but technology is a temporal product that means what happens today is not going to be the same thing for tomorrow and it's going to be a different cost and it's not just money it's the cost of individuals time and doing that contribution so throwing dollars at the problem the time, energy, and capacity to contribute their knowledge and expertise to these projects that's another expectation that needs to be a more forthright I mean you kind of Paris I think you summed it up quite well it's a misunderstanding about what those dollars are going towards those dollars do not fund maintainers similar with I put this project in the sandbox there's no magical community that can help to maintain it and I think there's a misunderstanding on both those fronts of what happens so yeah I think it is kind of a thing that the GB should be talking about more and thinking about more of how do we clear that up how do we you know continue to iterate reiterate that yes there are things that need dollars money solves some problems it doesn't put hands on keyboards so if you're a user this is how the system works we also need the other part you know it's kind of been a discussion that's happened on and off for a couple years about like well is this the model of this foundation is it not and I think today it is not and so that needs to just be made clear to folks because I think people have heard what's gone on in some of the discussions and we need to say this is the conclusion that we've come to about this model I think the one thing that's become clear there is it's about expectations I think each and every one of us is at one point today said better expectation setting is something that we should work on so the gifts and the guests need to be very clearly that you know when you are giving the money at what level what are you getting out of it and to Paris's point what aren't you getting I think it's just as important it is a pervasive problem throughout open source there's actually a talk that I'm looking forward to later on this week by Dims and Tim Hocken talking about people coming to repos and leaving comments on issues like again they get a free sandwich they get a free project and they're like but why aren't you implementing my feature and I'm just gonna come and I'm gonna come on an issue and talk about I want my feature now why don't you just go do it like people just come out of thin air to go and work on a thing and it's like if you want something from an open source project whether you are an individual user, whether you're a vendor whether you're a member company you need to invest into it not just in the short term but continuously and having that expectation of like oh I can just write a check to the CNCF and that will cover everything that I ever need to contribute to this project and all I need to care about is in that one check once a year doesn't quite cut it so yeah thank you I'm the same theme and I don't disagree with anything you've said but just to echo and maybe as a FYI during the contributor summit yesterday and maybe also important to call out the Kubernetes contributor summit I think in the future near term it's going to become a maintainer summit which is a beneficial change to broaden the scope but Kubernetes community yesterday repeated asked why don't we have fellows how could we get something how could we get some very similar discussion there but it's a it's a misunderstanding I think folks are looking to the LF and seeing a model there and wishing they had more of that and then I don't know where it's gone but OpenSSF was talking about hiring hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and I don't know if it's going to work but I don't know if it's going to work but I don't know if it's going to work but honestly there's challenges to doing that I think but expectations people are seeing other things out there and wanting some of it somehow but also everything you said about how it's a challenge to make it work it is completely true yeah so let me comment a little bit on the fellow so I think that the one of the big challenges when you have models like that where you're putting dollars towards getting you know either key folks or like you know giving grants to folks who are contributing to projects is that it does become then an expectation as folks have talked about that the free sandwiches continue but the other challenge it introduces is the companies who are contributing to the foundation their mind shifts which is from we invest in the projects and we put engineers on it because it's valuable to us to well we're paying the foundation for this why isn't this being funded or why aren't the funds being distributed to the maintainers and I think that to kind of build that vision of letting a thousand flowers bloom in the CNCF the way it's structured to support projects and support maintainers but not to directly finance maintainers is an essential part of it but we do need to find ways that we can continue to grow a robust ecosystem of maintainers and continue that forward when there's been a cute prompt something yeah actually so Steven's there reminded me of something else that happened at contributor summit there's a lot of question and this is a recurring thing but I think it's growing in the current map of economics everybody's saying okay so if we're not going to get that for our money how do I better advocate internally at my company and somebody mentioned an idea of perhaps we could try to build something for a forum where folks like you folks like me and others here that we share our knowledge on how we do that we teach these people who are maybe becoming senior developers how to talk to their CTO somebody that they never actually get to talk to or not comfortable talking to but maybe we start sharing some of that a little more formally a couple thoughts but actually what I'm hearing is this little road show should be at the end of the contributor summit like a sit down between the two groups sounds like that really needs to happen rather than you know maybe just a separate a separate thing but yeah Tim something you said I think is just a theme that we've seen over and over again with this disconnect between there is business value in what somebody is doing but they don't know how to communicate it in a way that hits the home with the person who's cutting the check and anything that we can do to help bridge that gap I think would be fantastic it's I think the real challenge here is we're all trained to operate in this world a certain way and the way that open source works is not that way so we bring expectations that when we exchange money for goods and services right but when we come to this if you to go volunteer and serve soup to people on Thanksgiving or something like that you have different expectations but people are bringing the expectations that are set in life into this forum and when they don't stand meet those expectations they kind of you know there's a gap and people are unsatisfied so understanding how to create something that operates for people that's against the grain of what society is today is really the challenge that we're up against and I think that that is going to be a really tough problem to solve and it's probably going to be a mix of both right centralized and decentralized answers where we direct funding through some places and have it it's just a really hard problem that's evident in this space but probably there are other forums in life where we have very similar problems if you've ever served on a PTA going to a PTA board meeting is exactly like going to a CNCF meeting nobody's got any money there's problems everywhere and there's five people that help and the school's got 5,000 kids so I want to add on to what Anne was talking about is there's a skills gap within software engineering that is not taught in universities it's not taught when you're in the business or in a nonprofit it's one of those things that you learn through trial and error and exposure opportunities and it is being able to speak to others and communicate effectively it wasn't until I joined open source that I was able to start understanding more about business needs and obligations to their shareholders and that was after I left the federal government to be able to learn those skills has been invaluable and then trying to teach that to others how to untie those knots to be impactful to the business and show that your contributions that are happening upstream many links away from where the business can actually see dollars coming back in for a return on investment that's a hard sell and being able to talk that talk and not only do that but reach the individuals that are in the positions of authority to allow you to have those opportunities is exceedingly difficult and it's not something that's talked about very often and it's something that's very difficult to get published in a way that's consistent because your business as an end user or your business as a vendor is going to have very different incentives and we need to provide guidance, education, awareness opportunities for software engineers in the ecosystem to capitalize on those resources and this institutional knowledge that many of us have amassed and it's got to be on a case by case basis we can generalize up to a certain degree but ultimately you are an engineer you are designed in your brain to figure out how things work and to make improvements so this is something that we all have the capacity to do it's just a different application of that skill set one thing that I cannot advocate for strongly enough and we've done very effectively where I am is we have an internal workshop for communication skills for engineers part of it is how do I communicate technical skills how do I write a better RFC that part's mostly written a little bit verbal and then part is more business value stuff that part's more verbal less written but it's a pretty intensive course that engineers have the feedbacks been phenomenal it's something we've only been doing a couple years and a program will definitely expand all right I think that pretty much brings us us to the end of this session I'm sure we'll be around the conference so find us I know if you want to ask a question if you didn't feel like asking a question in public you want to catch us in private we'll be all open for discussions but thank you very much and thank you to all the GB members