 Welcome everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so excited to be here to talk about some of our experiences building globally accessible communities. So just to get a quick read of the room, who here is from Europe or the United States? All right. Who here is not from Europe or the United States? All right, who is building global communities? Who is part of a global community? That one's kind of a trick question because like we all are. Awesome. All right, so just a quick overview of what we're going to be discussing today. So we will start off, you'll get to know us. You'll get to know a little bit of the communities that we're working with and we'll be pulling some examples from. We are going to define what exactly we're talking about when we say global community and then why they're so important. Then we'll get into how to communicate the value, how to build your community and how to advocate for your community as well. So a little bit about us to start, I'm Caitlin Barnard. I run our global community programs at Kong. It's one of the most downloaded open source API gateways and we are also the creators of Kuma. Kuma is an open source service mesh and a project of CNCF. So prior to that I worked at CNCF where I contributed to the Kubernetes community and one of my biggest passions in the open source space is growing both code and non-code contributions because there is such a wide range of talent that our ecosystem can take advantage of. I'm Hannah Ouellette. I'm the community manager at NGINX which is the most widely used web server in the world. It can also be used for load balancing, reverse proxying and more. NGINX is an open source project that's been around since 2008. Prior to NGINX I was at Postman, an API testing platform and before that I was actually at Kong which is where I got to know about the open source community and where I met Caitlin. All right so a few of the examples that we're going to be pulling from the first is Kong. So Kong has over 190,000 community members. One of the areas we've really invested in over the past years our meetup community so we have over 12,000 members there across 46 different countries so that really gives you an idea of how distributed our community is. We also consider Kuma part of that extended community as well. Yeah when I was at Postman there are about 19 million users mostly on the free tier and about 22,000 people on the forum that I managed. Most of the community engagement with Postman is actually within the app for collaboration but I still learned a lot about community management that I bring to my open source work today. NGINX has our largest community presence in the US, China and EMEA. We have folks introducing themselves in our community slack from Turkey to Tunisia to Texas. And then obviously we're at KubeCon so we'll be pulling from some of our experiences within the CNCF community and Kubernetes as well. So what is a global community? A global community are a group of folks that are drawn together with a connection between economics, politics, interest groups or more. We're focusing on global developer communities which are drawn in connection to interest in technologies. A global community accepts and encourages contributions from all around the world. This is in contrast with a local community where someone might be focused specifically on a certain continent or region. Often US and Europe based companies do focus on one continent or region and there's good reason for that. It's often where the employees are, it's where the money comes from and therefore where the resources go. However, a truly global community makes it easy to participate across regions, geographies and cultures. So global communities are important because of talent and opportunity. There are millions of developers around the world who don't have access to opportunities to get themselves out there on stage or to participate in communities to contribute to technologies. Having a global community creates these opportunities and celebrates the talents of underserved regions. So diversity in representation, so diversity of ideas and getting new perspectives on software is so crucial, you know, viewpoints that we don't currently have. We tend to get really inward looking when we only focus on our own region and then it often becomes that echo chamber, right? And it's also important to see people who look like you doing the things you want to be doing. Representation really does matter, especially when you're getting involved in something new for the first time. And then that all creates velocity and momentum. So mobilizing your global community allows you to move quicker and more efficiently, scaling adoption and jumpstarting innovation. So investing in the community is sometimes a difficult conversation to have because it really is that long tail investment that has less direct attribution to the bottom line of your business. So at Kong we talk a lot about the open source flywheel and how we use that life cycle to grow open source adoption and continue innovating. So today I want to talk about that in the context of the community flywheel because it functions in a really similar way. There's a lot of different versions of this, but this is the version that I'm going to use as an example for our purposes today. So the idea is that you want to build your community to lead to that long tail adoption. Community isn't an investment that you make and then reap the benefits of overnight. It's an investment in future champions, users, contributors of your technology. So by building your community you lead to that increased adoption, those passionate users turn into champions, those champions then provide really valuable feedback on your technology that allows you to either improve on your existing technology or innovate on new market needs and then that leads to that long tail repeatable adoption pattern. And that's really where the true value of community build lies, building that strong foundation of users, contributors, champions that allow you to spin that flywheel as fast as possible and increase that long tail adoption. These are oftentimes the people that keep coming back no matter what organization they end up at and they're oftentimes the first adopters of any type of new technology you introduce as well. So different communities have a wide variety of needs that span across cultures, geographies, and regions and as community stewards it's our responsibility to meet these needs where possible. Some regions run into culture challenges that we don't run into in the US and Europe. For example, I was working with a local community leader to host a meetup in a city in Nigeria outside of Lagos and meetups are popular there but most of the venues don't have Wi-Fi available and so members that came were actually hotspotting from their phone. However, mobile data is really expensive so this ultimately was costing community members money to come to a free event. Her request was for a prepaid data plan. While we didn't end up going forward with the meetup for other reasons, we were starting to figure out how to make this work. Another consideration is platforms. Not all countries use meetup.com as their primary meetup platform for example and many use other chat apps besides what we usually use. So for example, WeChat is really popular in China and Japan. The NGINX community in China is largely organized on WeChat that's everything from troubleshooting to event promotion to product announcements. There's also a telegram group for NGINX in Russia where folks are communicating and troubleshooting about NGINX in Russian language and at Postman we had a telegram group called Postman en Español. It was started by some folks in I want to say Colombia that grew to be a whole Latin American region. Employees initially just joined and learned and practiced our Spanish and then eventually helped moderate it. If you're not meeting your community where they're at on these platforms, they might start these areas all on their own for better or worse. It's a great thing when a community takes initiative and is able to drive itself and on the other hand it means that you're losing opportunities for moderation and control. Additionally, passionate enthusiasm from developers also are important resources across regions and it's important to leave door open for opportunities for them too. If you're having a paid workshop or a paid event for example 10 euros to someone here in Europe is really different than that same amount of money for someone in India for example and so by having paid events for community initiatives you might be closing the door on community members across the globe. So let's start with some of the main obstacles that we've run into in building global programs because these can often be a really simple fix but quite a big barrier to entry. You're going to hear me refer to programs a lot throughout this section and a program can really be any type of resource that a community member consumes either virtually or in person or attends things like meetups, events, content, user calls, forums, etc. So the first is complex language and this is one that I struggle with the most personally. So for example we rely on English as our language for our global programs. We don't have the resources to translate everything into multiple languages so we've standardized on English and while many people speak English not everyone speaks English natively, right? So it's really important to avoid things like filler words, colloquialisms, figures of speech like metaphors, idioms, that type of stuff. Keep your language straightforward and to the point while of course maintaining a level of friendliness and then when you're speaking live being intentional with your words, speaking slowly and clearly. So the second piece is localization. So while we don't have the resources to translate every global program into different languages, we do translate regional and local programs where appropriate. So we really rely on our local employees and community members in these cases. I often try to give them a starting point with Google translate and carry it as far as I can and then have them review it to make sure that everything is correct and accurate. This is also where attention to detail is really important. Things like ensuring that the local time zone is correct if they're in daylight savings time or not. If they use 12 or 24 hour time, that your addresses are formatted correctly using Oxford commas or not where they are commonly used. So a lot of times the content should feel like it's coming from a local and you know if you're in doubt bring someone in from that local community who knows for sure. The next is accessibility. So for a lot of global programs, it's going to be hard to pick a time that works for everyone but you can optimize for different time zones. So we do our user call early in the morning Pacific time to cover most of Europe and then we record for anyone that is unable to attend. We try to get that recording out same day so that they have access to it right away and then our information to ask us any further questions. We also are going to start experimenting with later time zones for Asia and then in an ideal world I would love to expand these to regional programs where we have times for North America, Europe, Asia and then tailor the content to those regions specifically. This is also where kind of platform accessibility comes into play. So as Hannah mentioned different platforms are popular in different countries. So for example we're established on meetup for our global meetup programs but ComPASS is more popular in Japan. So we have our local programs, our local meetups on there as well. And then some platforms like Zoom aren't accessible in every country. They're not, it's not even accessible at every company sometimes with different firewall restrictions. So your platform choice is going to depend greatly on kind of what works for the majority of your community members and where they're located. But it's kind of important to pick what works for most of them and then add in those regional solutions where appropriate. And then finally I just want to touch on code of conducts. So this is incredibly important to have in place from the very beginning because it protects both you and your community members by setting a level of expectation of how they should interact and what's appropriate. It also protects you as a company or a community leader to be able to intervene if an issue does arise. So we've based our code of conduct off the contributor covenant. That's what CNCF and Kubernetes uses as well. This is a great starting point if you are creating a code of conduct for the first time or if you just want to make sure that your code of conduct you know covers everything that could possibly come up. So if you've decided to establish a new region first off congratulations and good luck. It is key to get to know folks that are there in the region and have someone on the ground you can talk to for ideas to leverage your local network and to really find out what's going on. Most important when you're trying to establish in a local region is to actually talk to people there and find out what is needed especially compared to the regions you're already in. That shows one you genuinely care and want to have a respectful community presence in that area and two also means you're more likely to get things right the first time instead of learning the hard way which we all do anyway. It's easiest to get started where you have employees and even a single employee can provide good insight or local contacts. And if you don't have employee presence in the region contact your partners leverage the relationship that your channel or biz dev teams have made get to know adjacent communities. Getting to know local communities is also the next step so you could have partnerships or sponsor events. You can build your network out that way. An example from postman was getting to know former Google developer group student leaders and reaching out and saying hey we have this postman community trying to get off the ground champions program and that was able to introduce me to folks who already had previous community experience who already had the resume of building out global communities in their region and who had the passion and enthusiasm that they could drive forward in their professional careers. Also your network is wider than just who you know so you can ask people hey who else to whom should I talk to you in this community who else can you introduce me to. I found it worked really well when I was building out my champions program in Lagos to say I would really like to get to know other Nigerian developers who use postman and have some folks on stage to have multiple representatives from Nigeria. While you want to avoid tokenization folks hearing that they actually want established presence from their country specifically went a really long way in both building those connections and getting people to participate. And importantly representation goes a really long way saying someone who looks like you or acts like you participating in community encourages you to do so the same. If you see someone speaking in Spanish online it might be easier to start responding Spanish and participating as well. If you see someone from your region on stage it might inspire you to be on stage as well. And empower your global community by giving them the tools they need to do things on their own right. So we launched our community organizer program this past year. Shout out to Dahlia who is our amazing global community manager who's in the audience and really spearheaded this. And you know we asked all of our meetup members if anyone wanted to become a meetup organizer. We provide funding swag content when they need it. We provide support but it's really up to them to be the on the ground person organizing these events. So we had a ton of interest but in particular I want to highlight one of our organizers of our Bangalore meetup Avinash. So we have no KONG employees based in India yet. So Avinash has really been organizing these meetups completely on his own. The Bangalore group has quickly grown to be our largest community meetup. We have over 1200 members and regularly 100 people in attendance. You know Avinash is a fantastic organizer in his own right but he has our full backing to go out and really do these things on his own and we're there to help him when he needs it. And then just to expand on our earlier section on communicating the value. So that work doesn't stop once you've established your community. And this is where metrics comes into play because once your community starts growing you can start sharing those success stories. So there's a few different ways to approach metrics. The first is to use common terminology that's already established within your business or your community. So this can be things like monthly active users, signups, general membership numbers like number of Slack members, number of meetup members. This is especially useful if you've standardized on one single hub for your community. But for us we try to be wherever our community is. So we have a ton of different channels. And if that's how your community is you can come up with a metric that's basically total total membership. So add up all the membership across those different channels. The one risky run here is double counting some folks. You can also do total community activities. So things like attended a meetup, started GitHub repo, posted on Slack. This gives you more of that type of engagement metric. And then there's also some tools out there now that helps de-dupe some of these information and automates that tracking. So tools like common room or orbit. A lot of this reporting is already built in and then they are free for non-commercial open source projects as well. This is also a great place to showcase third party metrics. So for example Stack Overflow does a great yearly survey on the developer community and about how 66 percent of developers have some level of influence over technology decisions within their companies. There's also some great studies on top growing tech regions. So Google and Disrupt Africa have done some great reports on the growth of the African community in particular. 19 out of 20 of the fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa. There's over 700,000 developers and startups in Africa have had 1694 percent growth in funding since 2015. But at the end of the day, these are real people behind your community. They aren't just numbers. So sharing personal stories is a great way to showcase the impact of your community. It really allows people to put a face to a name. We do champions profiles that we share out on social media. We do recaps of our local meetups to talk about showcasing our organizers and what the local community is doing there. And then finally, empathy. This in my opinion is the most important way to advocate. I have had the honor to meet and work with people from all over the world during my time in open source. I have learned a ton about different countries and cultures that I wouldn't have been exposed to any other way. And it's really my hope to give back to these communities as much as they have given me. And we have a ton of privilege as tech companies. We have a ton of privilege to be able to invest in these communities and amplify much of the work that they're already doing. All right. Thank you so much. Are there any questions? Hello. My name is Pedro. Just a question. For example, in Nigeria, holding events, is it English speaking or the whole event or typically depending on the country, the local language? Yeah. In Nigeria specifically, it has been English, but we do try to do local languages. So for postmen with our meetups in Latin America, we encourage them to be in Spanish, especially online. We had a couple of Brazilian meetups that were done in Portuguese. When it comes to local events, especially something like meetups, I think that language is really important as an aspect of inclusion. And so encouraging as many local languages as possible is a great practice. When you're growing a community, which do you optimize for? More community members that are only passively engaged? Do you really double down on those that show an active interest and try and create a smaller group? That's a great question. I personally believe in doing both. I think driving awareness to the greatest amount of people is fantastic. And this is going to really depend on what your technology is and how relevant it is to that group of people. But I think casting a wide net is great because you can benefit those people in one way or another and make them part of the community and throughout their journey with you. They can kind of grow and continue their usage. If you have something that's a little bit more niche or more specific to a certain group of developers, then I think curating that smaller group is better. And I think for a lot of programs, that smaller group is better too because it lets people engage and interact and ask questions of each other and network. And that in terms of individual community programs, in my opinion, is a great approach. I personally would focus, if I had to prioritize between the two, I agree with Caitlin on doing both. I personally would prioritize on the highly engaged smaller group of people, quality over quantity, as a step to engaging the people that are further out there. If there are more people that are engaged, it shows that there's something for those other people to join. It gives examples and inspiration for people and, oh, I could be like that too. And it can also help dial in your programs. And so if you're asking someone to engage further by going through one of your programs, having that first group go through is like the canary in the coal mines. Ooh, there's me using an idiom, the exact example of what we don't want to do in our talk. You can use that kind of as the testers for your program as well and dial that in before you open up a wider net. Yeah, it's a great point too. It depends kind of on the maturity of your community. Thank you all. We'll be up here if you have any other questions or want to talk one-on-one. Thank you.