 Hi, everybody. Welcome to Shaping Kubernetes Community Culture. My name is Eva Black, and I am an open source program manager in Azure. I'm also part of the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee. Hi, my name is Bob Killen. I am a program manager at Google, and I'm a member of the Community Steering Committee as well as a co-chair of Sick Contributor Experience. While we were planning this keynote, I've also been playing Volheim. It's a little sandbox survival game that came out a few months ago. Along my adventures, I found some abandoned buildings in this really awesome spot on the map. I told my friends and they rushed over, started chopping wood and carrying ore, and pretty soon we transformed it into this thriving little village. So whether you're adventuring in the Viking afterlife or working in open source, community is where it's at. And the Kubernetes community has grown from a little village back at the very first CNCF summit next to Oskan in 2015, right at the back of the room and watched to this incredible global community we have today. And so by about 2017, that community had grown to 4,000 people and the Bootstrap Steering Committee decided to write down their values, to write down what they believed the whole community's core values to be. And that's about the time that the second generation of leaders were coming up in the ranks. And now today in 2021, our community is so much larger. Just looking at Slack, it's over 120,000 people. And so it is even more important as we continue to grow to pass on our values and to not just be willing to learn from each other, but to really want to and to want to see new perspectives. So it's not just the total size of our contributor community, but also the number of leads, our sub-project owners, our org members and more. Our organizational structure had to evolve in 2017 to handle and support like a few thousand. Now today we're close to just 20,000 new contributors in the past year. That's larger than many cities. And that's way larger than my little village in Valheim. And our early leaders described our core values in ways that reflected who we are as a community and who we as individuals strive to be. And while each new leader brings something new to the table, it is crucial that we don't lose sight of our core values and the values that shaped who this community, that this community that we love and that has been core to the success of the technical project itself. So what does it mean to embody those values? How do we pass them on? What can we learn from other open source communities or from our own history from world events? These are some of the questions that have been on our mind as the third generation of community leads. As a community, we're at a crossroads. The growth that we've experienced comes with a number of sailing challenges. But how do we continue to grow? How do we continue to support our contributors, our users and everyone that makes up our community? How do we make sure our values continue to be represented in our actions? Then today, when this becomes even more difficult when you add in the stressors from the pandemic, the isolation, the flagrant social injustice coming to a head, all of these things have been forced multipliers to the difficulty in maintaining our connections with each other. Much like Kubernetes technology, social groups have scalability limits too. In the 1990s, there was this anthropologist, Robin Dunbar. You might have heard of Dunbar's number. He theorized that social group size is related to mammalian brain structure. And while he's often quoted with just a single number, he actually postulated several different numbers that relate to different tiers of implicit trust. And in the outer group, about 1,000 or 2,000 are people that you'd have to reestablish context to if you met them again, like an old high school friend or something. And within the 150 to 250, which is the most quoted number, these are people that you might remember their name. You kind of know what they're working on, maybe a little bit about their life and you generally trust each other. Within the next tier, 20 to 30, are the people that you work with on a regular basis. You know what they're doing. You have trust in them that you share the same goals. And then that smallest group, about five, these are people you know so well you can anticipate their actions. And you can find this pattern repeated across human societies and open source communities. You can see it in the optimum size of a dev team and the two pizza rule, the maximum number of reports any manager should have. And this model can be used to inform how we understand the stressors on and the structure of any intentionally crafted social system. You might notice these circles roughly match the sizes of the Kubernetes steering committee, our tech leads and our SIG leads. So let's take a step back and look at some metrics. There's certainly a lot you can take a look at to try and tease out general contributor health. So why are we looking at PR reviews specifically? Well, it's also one of the best indicators we found for our core contributor health. Most reviews are completed by our org members and specifically those that have graduated become reviewers or approvers. They are active and they have consistently demonstrated many of the qualities that are laid out in our values. The other thing is for this, we are looking at the 119 release cycle for a reason. It kicked off right when we started first hearing the rumblings of COVID. Many people were challenged with suddenly moving remote and having to find ways to support themselves and their family members. It was obvious our contributors were impacted. People were tired. People are honestly still tired. But in response, the 119 release team made the call to extend the release to allow people more time to get the work done. But then later in the middle of the release cycle, the racial injustice in the United States and elsewhere came to the forefront. And the civil rights protests in the U.S. calling for the recognition of the injustices and the disadvantages faced by Black and African Americans quite literally poured into the streets and were consistently met with violent response from government. And while individual members of our community expressed their support, the community leaders also felt it was crucial to express our collective support publicly. As they say, an injustice ignored is an injustice condoned. So to demonstrate our values in one of the few ways that an organization can do, that steering and co-to-conduct agreed to post a banner. And in response, we received hateful and trolling messages from a small number of our community members. And I'm very disappointed by this. It's not acceptable. We expect better than that of each other. And I know how deeply this community values being a welcoming and safe place for everyone to bring their authentic selves. And I admire how much we support each other regardless of race or gender or sexuality or age, religion or country of origin. Now these events, from the protests to COVID to the responses we received to the banner created several opportunities for us as leaders, many of whom are not Black to learn. And there are two additional values that were not stated four years ago, but which we believe are core particularly to community leadership and that is transparency and accountability. And we will be introducing some new measures to increase transparency into our processes over the coming release cycle. So this is a community of peer accountability. We would allow our vision to the project be damaged if we did not uphold our, if we did nothing to uphold our values, if we did not welcome every qualified voice into technical discussions. Now, if you'd like to learn more about why we value diversity, empathy and humility so highly, why we felt the need to post a banner saying that Black Lives Matter, there'll be a link to some resources at the end of this talk. And you are invited to take responsibility for your own education here. Please do not put that labor on minority members of our community. And if after taking time to reflect to go through those resources and educate yourself, you still don't agree with a vision for an inclusive and welcoming community. Well, open source has a built-in release valve. You're welcome to leave. Meanwhile, we have more work to do. We are now on our third generation of leaders and it is more important than ever for us to reflect on our values, learn about our biases and our blind spots, lean into that uncomfortable space of personal growth and support the next generation. Now, to do this, the Code of Conduct Committee is going to take several concrete steps. We will improve transparency by publishing a guide to our incident report handling process, which is now on the site. We've opened up a public channel in Slack where folks can reach us, making ourselves more accessible and that is in addition to the private email address conduct at Kubernetes.io. Starting next quarter, we will also begin publishing transparency reports and to begin with, that'll cover only issues happening outside of conferences because we haven't had an in-person conference in a minute, but we will ensure that no one can be identified from these reports while aiming to provide the community with as much insight as we can into the type of incidences that we do handle. So in addition to that, we've started other initiatives to try and tackle some of these problems. Last year, the Linux Foundation invested $40,000 into developing and improving their unconscious bias training course. The steering committee made this course a requirement for our community group leaders, our SIGs, our working groups, our user groups and committee leads. And while we recognize that taking one course isn't going to eliminate bias in our community, it is one piece of a larger puzzle. But to be frank though, we haven't done enough and it's a problem we need to fix. This is a cultural mission and we need to be held accountable. There is no steering committee or CNCF policy that can just fix this in one fell swoop. This is a problem in open source in the tech industry at large, but we can take action here in our community. We are all leaders. Our community is hundreds of reviewers and approvers that look after our code, our docs, our policies and procedures, everything and we need to look out for others too. Next, we want to remove more of the barriers to contributing itself by making contributing the project more broadly accessible. In doing so, we will open the doors to many. We used to run our new contributor workshop alongside events like KubeCon, but there are thousands of people that weren't able to participate for financial, geopolitical, technical or other reasons. So to do this, we are turning our new contributor workshop into a free online course. Lastly, we are also expanding our mentorship and internship programs both in the conjunction with the CNCF and independently. We have worked with Outreachee, Google Summer of Code, LFX, and we want to work with others too. If this is something you or group, you work with is interested, please reach out. We have a lot of work to do. Thanks, Bob. It sounds like there's so much awesome stuff going on across this entire community. So folks, if you'd like to get involved or reach out to any of us, there's a bunch of links up here. And again, there's a link at the bottom of the slide to additional resources to educate yourself. Thanks so much for coming to the talk today. Thank you.