 Hey everyone, my name is Kunal and today I'm going to be sharing about how you can scale your communities to be more inclusive. So a little bit more about me. I've been involved in open source ever since I was in my freshman year. I started contributing to your Kubernetes Java client. That's when I realized that open source, at least for me as a student is a great way to get involved in the community, get some real world experience, enhance my skills and get so many opportunities, meet people from around the world and also help others get started with it. So since then I've been involved in like many mentorship programs, helping many, many other folks get involved in cloud native projects, getting more young folks involved in the cloud native projects. Apparently I'm working as a developer advocate at Civo and do some nice community work and I also love teaching. And I also started the official CNC student community where we conduct a lot of nice workshops and sessions. So that's pretty much about me. If you want to connect with me, you can connect with me on Twitter. So before we dive into how can we scale our communities to be more inclusive, we first have to define a community. So community may mean different things to different people. For some it might be like an open source project, for some it might be your study group, for example, or for some it might be like five to six people working together, studying and solving a problem or whatever. So what is a community? So according to me, community is a group of people that are sharing a goal and that brings them together. And on the way to look at this is, which is my next slide, which is what are your communities shared struggles. So when I talk about forming communities, most of the time that I've seen what brings the communities together is identifying what are the shared struggles. For example, when I was in my freshman year, we had a group of people who had a shared struggle of finding it difficult to contribute to open source. They had all of these people, you know, 100 and 150 people, they had like, they were asking similar questions like, hey, how do you get started with such a big project? Or the code base is really overwhelming. Where do we start? Where do we actually find projects to contribute to? Identifying what are the shared struggles of your community is extremely important. That sort of like defines your community. The next thing you have to talk about when you're asked to question, hey, what does your community mean? Which is, what is the mission of your community? Now, the mission of your community can change, you know, over the time over a course of few years, you should always remember what you set out to be, what your initial goal was and what is like, who is like your target audience? What you're trying to achieve? What are your values that you should definitely, you know, that the community has been built upon? Okay. And from that, you can have a particular mission like, okay, I want to get so many people get started with open source. I want more folks from this region involved in our projects or in our events. I want to have like a global community or I want to have like a localized chapter. So what is your mission? So once your mission is achieved, and you will have new missions. So the missions may change, but your original idea should be the same. Now, the next thing you have to ask yourself is what do members look to get out of your community? Why would anyone want to join? What do you have to offer? And speaking of how people can join, we also have to talk about effective communication. Because this is very, very crucial when we are talking about diversity and inclusion, because you may not know how many people are people from which background, from which domain, who might be underrepresented in tech, they may feel that it's difficult to get involved in the community. They may feel like, you know, that I might not have many things to offer. What am I going to do? It's really overwhelming. How do I start? Whom do I reach out to? So what do members look to get out of your community? Is there a particular skill they want to learn? Is there a particular event they want to attend? Is there a particular, you know, meet up they want to speak at, for example, or are they interested in like networking? Are they interested in contributing, which is an open source project? Do you want to contribute in the code way? Do you want to contribute in a non-code vein like documentation and stuff? Do you want to help in the marketing aspect or whatever? Okay, so you have to figure out what your members are trying to get out of your community, what you have to offer and, you know, best, right, what you have to offer. And effective communication basically means that having a streamlined way, like an effective way where people can reach out, basically, and ask questions. A few examples I can give for this is having like a public channel. You can have the mailing lists or for instant communication, you can have something like, you know, Discord or Slack or whatever. And one more thing that I would like to mention is if we're talking about making it more inclusive to people, like, for example, making it more inclusive and easier for people to reach out. I think like regular meetings can really help, especially if you're an open source project and actively looking for contributors, weekly meetings, monthly meetings, office hours, if you will. So that can really help drive new folks in. Keep it like open-ended and where everyone can, you know, join and anyone can join and share their views, start contributing. Ask questions, ask doubts, even answer questions, give their own, you know, feedback and make sure the feedback is heard because that is also important because people healing from, you know, different cultural backgrounds and it's an instrumental, it's an asset for the instrumental, the growth of the IT sector, you know, that people from various backgrounds are putting forward their views. It's definitely also going to help the community grow as well. So effective communication is very important. One more important point that comes over here is code of conduct, which we'll talk more about later on. Now, making a community future proof is also very important because, you know, the only one who's going to be running the community forever, you might have other engagements as well. So it's very important to make your community future proof. One way I do it is identifying current community members who might be interested in what their strengths are and forming teams into, you know, various aspects of the community that, you know, all the various teams are required to run a community. So like socials and technical and marketing and content, for example, and proof reading or whatever, right, a contributor experience, for example. So making a community future proof is selecting thought leaders like from these active community leaders and people who might be interested in taking forward the lead and who might be interested in taking charge and who might be interested in who might be having great ideas, for example. So what I can remember is really someone was contributing to our community and they made our Discord server very nicely. We were able to scale it from zero till around 25,000 users in just under a month and people were asking doubts actively over there. There was like a proper code of conduct and rules and regulations and different channels for different things, making sure there was no spam. Now they're leading our entire Discord and the open source program management and everything they are doing. So how did I figure out that they wanted to because they showed interest, right? They came and they showed interest and they wanted to do it. I'm like, okay, sure, you're already doing great work. Go ahead. So I'm not saying like directly like do it today, but make sure you're making a community future proof. So importance of diversity and inclusion. This is a very important point because people, you know, as I mentioned, we're healing from different parts of the world. It's important for them to showcase their views and knowledge as well. First thing like why it's important because you as a community are providing them a platform. So if you're not going to do it, who is going to do it? If the communities are not going to do it, then who is going to do it? There might be many, many other people because the community aspect, even of various companies, many, many other companies, you know, big tech giants, they also have a community aspect. They're also running diversity and inclusion programs. Why are they doing it? Because it's important. It's important to recognize people on the basis of, you know, the efforts they're putting in and if they want to get involved, their enthusiasm, their, you know, interest. And as a community leader point of view, it's definitely helping your community grow as well, right? Because you're talking about Kubernetes, for example. So Kubernetes has the Kubernetes community days groups all around the world. New Delhi, you know, India, various parts of India, North America, South America, you know, Europe and Africa, for example. So it's helping the community scale as well. How is it helping it? Because more and more people are conducting their localized events. More and more people are contributing to the open source projects. More and more people are sharing their views. It's like a two-way communication sort of a thing. It's helping the community as well. Community grow, reaching worldwide audience and helping as many people as you can. And it's also helping the people get involved. It's very important. And when we're talking about the importance of diversity and inclusion, one of the most important points you have to look into is who might be excluded from accessing the activities of your community. These barriers can be a lot. For example, language barriers, someone who might not be able to understand the documentation in your language or whatever. So that might be a barrier. Some of the barriers might be your community is not having effective communication. Other barriers might be geographical regions. Some people might be facing imposter syndrome like the community is, let's say, not beginner friendly. So you know that your good first issues exist for a reason. Even if you're talking about some of the biggest projects in the world, some of the most complex projects in the world, they also have beginner friendly issues. And Kubernetes, I believe, is like the second biggest projects in the world. I think so. Yeah, I think so. And it also has beginner friendly issues. I as a student, so many students who are contributing in a non code bay, even in code bay. So there are like so many LFX mentorship programs and everything in which they are participating. So you have to figure out who might be excluded from accessing the activities of your community. It also depends on what kind of activities you're running. If you're running a hackathon, if you're running an event, if you're running a webinar. So if you're running a webinar in a local language, so people from around the world who might not be able to attend due to language restrictions or travel restrictions or so on and so forth. So a great example for this can be the open source summit. Many people might not be able to attend for, let's say, the financial region. So open source summit, they provide diversity and need big scholarships. So that's diversity and inclusion in action. So shout out to them. All right. One more thing that is very important when you talk about diversity, inclusion and stuff, which is handling negative scenarios. If you're at an event or if you're at a workshop, you're conducting something or if you're conducting a hackathon, there might be some negative scenarios. It really happens, but it sometimes does happen. The best way to deal with these scenarios or conflicts, if you will, is make sure that both the parties are feeling safe. It's the most important point. One of the ways you can do this is make sure you take them to a different area or whatever away from the event and then you ask them to make sure you hear both the sides. And if this has been a violation of code of conduct, make sure you take strict actions and make sure that these things don't get repeated again and again. So various scenarios are dealt with differently and it totally depends on the severity, but it's important to hear both the sides and it's also important to take form actions as well. Depending upon what the violation was, we'll talk more about code of conduct in the end. Now, this is another important point when we're talking about diversity and inclusion and scaling communities. This is one of the key points when we're talking about diversity and inclusion. Designing your communities needs. What do the community members need? Now, there are two types of needs. Needs that are facilitated. Needs that are not facilitated. So in-person events, for example, they ask us, hey, would you like vegan food? Would you like non-vegetarian food? Would you like vegetarian food? Do you have any allergies or something? So that's needs that are facilitated. It is including diversity and inclusion. In the badges, we can see that, hey, you can talk to me or you can maintain a social distance or I'm not able to talk to anyone right now. They're different color of badges. So, another thing that needs to be facilitated like, hey, is the venue of your event wheelchair accessible? Do you have nutritional or do you have like ingredient values written on the food items, for example? Do you have proper sanitation and everything for speakers or so on and so forth? So these are needs that are facilitated. This is something you can learn from other events. You can gradually learn from your past events as well. What needs were facilitated, what people required and one more way by which you can do this is actually sending out surveys to attendees, right? So what could have been improved, what you liked, what you learned and what you could improve, right? Cool. The next one is needs that are not facilitated. It might be possible that at your event sometimes there might be some needs that you were not able to facilitate. As for example, you can say something like, hey, really sorry that we did not have like dairy-free products or really sorry we don't have a feeding room, for example, right? So such needs that might not be, or let's say my event is not wheelchair accessible, for example. So these are important needs, but let's say these were, let's say for some reason, it was not facilitated at your event. For new event organizers, this sometimes does happen. The best way to deal with this is be honest and redirect. So don't like meet around the bush, just be honest like, hey, you know, we really missed out on this and I really apologize and we'll try to do our best in like the future events and we'll make sure this does not happen again. So try to see what you can do on spot for them, right? That's all like more like an ad hoc thing for depending on the situation, but make sure you are honest. Make sure you are direct, like, hey, we'll apologize and we'll make sure that you take a note of this for the future events. So that are needs that are not facilitated. Code of conduct. I'm sure everyone is, you know, aware of what code of conducts are. Yeah, like in so many other communities and make open source projects. So basically, this is sort of like a set of rules and regulations for the community, like be polite, no spamming, no promotions or whatever and no, you know, no bad talks. This basically be a good person. Right. So these are like the general stuff and it also applies to us as like human beings. Like we are good human being and always be kind and don't make bad comments on basis of anyone's, you know, like race or gender or don't discriminate on the basis of these things. Right. So these are like basic human ethics that we should follow on top of it. A community may have their own set of rules and regulations. So this totally depends on like your community and what sort of rules and regulations do you have? Obviously the basic human nature, the good nature that everyone should follow that should be there. But on top of that, you can have your own. One more thing that I would like to mention over here, many people forget to add is make sure you add a point of contact for emergencies. Right. So if someone wants to report a violation of a code of conduct, they should be able to reach out to a particular person. You can either list an email or a phone number. This is very, very crucial when you're at an event. Right. So having a point of contact where people can reach out to report a violation of the code of conduct. It's very important. So I hope that gave you a little bit of idea about, you know, how you design your community, what do you mean by a community, how you figure out what our community is needs and all the things and the points that I mentioned in the slides. You can, you know, think about those and try to think about in the perspective of your own community and how you can use those points and figure out the strengths and weaknesses and how people might not be able to, you know, let's say access or what they might be excluded from accessing in your community and then you can act upon it and hopefully that was helpful. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me on Twitter. I'm more than happy to help. And yeah, hope you have a great event and thanks a lot for watching. Thank you.