 OK, so this session is an AMA. Ask me anything for the CNCS staff that we got on stage today. I just want to do a quick set of housekeeping. There's myself and Mario. We're going to be running around with mics. This is an open forum. I do want to just remind everyone that this event like any other runs by the Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. OK, but it is an open forum and I have been told that some spicy questions are welcome. OK, well, that's going to be up to you how spicy was the question. It's going to be up to you. As a note in our retro items, we do have for next time this is on that we should send out an anonymous form in advance for questions. We have failed to do so, so that's something that we might do for next time. But what I would love to do is for folks on the stage to introduce themselves and then we'll get started with questions from the audience. Hello, my name is Jeffrey Sika. I think pretty much everyone know you start off strong. All you know me is Jeefy. I started as a Kubernetes contributor and now I work for the CNCF hold the title of head of projects. All that really means is if projects need something or, you know, one side of the house is on fire. I run over and try and fix it as best as I can. Yeah, hi. How do you everybody? My name is Taylor Gillis. I'm head of ecosystem and I try to understand Jeefy's interpretive dances as he runs to the other side of the house. And sometimes things are on fire. I get to work with end users and also got started in Kubernetes. I took a look a couple of weeks back and I think the first contribution I made was for a typo. So yeah, that's fun. You got to fix those two typos. Hey, Chris Sanizik was employee zero of CNCF and kind of helped bring this thing together. These days I serve as CTO and mostly just try to keep the ship moving and plugging all the holes and making sure as many people are as happy as possible. But other than that, looking forward to kind of hearing from you all and answering some questions. And he provides great direction as well. So, you know, yeah, like the whole I'm aim is to provide a parent. I'm the director of developer programs. And hilariously, I realized as we were doing some of the pieces around like, you know, trapping contributors, I'm actually not a Kubernetes contributor. Right. So it's possible. It's entirely possible to be in the ecosystem and part of like the larger whole. So happy to hear questions. Happy to take us off from here. Actually, right. How's that possible? How's that possible? I'm looking it up right now. It's just possible. It is one of those magical things where there is so big of a space. Yeah. All right. One last thing we will start with questions in a moment. However, if you do want to ask something anonymously, it's only not going to be anonymous because you can send it directly to me on Slack and I'll read it out without your name, obviously as a heads up questions. Hands up, please. Yeah, we got a question back. I mean, we can make up questions for ourselves too. So as someone that has gone through the onboarding process for projects a couple of times in the last year, I've definitely noticed that there is some, shall we say documentation drift in what services are available for projects, certain processes. What is being done to address that and make that a little clearer? I will first off start by owning that. Thank you for the input around like this is an area of unevenness that we could do a lot of work around. So thank you. So we recently and by recently, I mean, I wanted to ship this just before the con worked with tag contributor strategy to carve out an entire section in contribute.cncf.io where it is project resources. So internally, some of how the sauce is made. There was a website that you could only find. This is fun only find by Googling it.cncf project services. And I'm not kidding. There were no other links to it, at least that I could find and I work here. So then we found the repo where you could, you know, perform updates and we started updating that repo. And then we found out, Oh, this has to be, we have to send a message to someone to say, please update the website. Like it was, it was awful internally. So now go to contribute.cncf.io. There's a link at the top for resources. And that is all just like a normal website that we have. So we can auto update it. And we are starting to populate it with all the other sites and information that we had. And we're also trying to do things like add in a lot more of the self service stuff that maintainers and projects can do. They just might not know. It's also not meant to be like an exhaustive list. Like if there's just something random you want, always feel free to kind of ask at the end of the day. Exotic swag event. And Bob wants. Did we answer your question or did we get more questions? Asked because Amy is almost certainly very sick of my service test tickets. So like never, never, never. Yes, thank you. Questions. I mean, if you don't have questions, I'll have questions. Hey, I asked the same question to the Kubernetes steering this morning. So I'm going to ask you the same question. So what are the access of sustainability you are all working on for all of us? And what specifically would you want Kubernetes project to do to make ourselves more sustainable going forward? I mean, yeah, maybe I'll start like sustainability. There's many different ways to look at it, right? There's like how how stable is the project? Is it responding to security issues? Like there's a lot of things that we try to fund from a CNCF perspective around audits. We even have employees that do non feature generally related work stuff like supporting Kubernetes builds effort. We've had technical documentation folks. Generally, we don't have folks that work on like feature or product related, you know, things. And so we kind of do what we can on that front. Like we have 180 plus projects now. So it's impossible to hire, you know, one person per project in terms of how we're a resource and staff, but we kind of drew our effort. What the Kubernetes project could do in other CNCF projects is just try to make your needs aware as soon as, you know, possible, just like any organization, we do go through like an annual budget planning type process. And if some projects are like, Hey, we need help with our build, or Hey, we need help with documentation. We could plan a little bit more in advance. I know Kubernetes does these annual reports amongst all the different kind of SIGs. If there is maybe some ways to get like really what the needs are outside of that typical process earlier at that aligns with our like kind of end of year planning, that would be useful. But I could, I could, I could opine forever on this topic. Like the foundation will, I think, I don't think we'll ever be able to like employ like full-time, you know, maintainers for all projects. Like we could potentially come in maybe an emergency situation that maybe have like a, like a fellow type of program, but that's still very difficult. You know, the only projects I've seen fellowships work well, it's like Linux. The reason it works in some ways is because Linus is like the, you know, BDFL style, right? And so they trust him due to that Kubernetes has run a little bit, you know, differently. But yeah, I'll stop talking and maybe other people have comments. I think the only other thing, and this is kind of seconding what I said earlier this morning, we try and do a lot of outreach. And if you need help, please reach out to us so we can reach out to the folks that you want to talk to like, oh, I just got you wanting to go, didn't I? If there are particular organizations or companies that you think are not doing enough outside of like all of them, particular ones, please let me know because, you know, we've had a, there's been some funny incidents. Like, you know, this, this KubeCon, for example, we probably three X the amount of scholarships that we provided, right? And some of these were to billion trillion dollar companies in some ways that I think should be doing more to support their employees. And so we're going to be having kind of a lot of conversations with folks to see what else can they do. So please don't be scared to be direct, at least with us. And then we'll kind of have the other conversations with folks. And we've done this previously when we've had kind of issues with, you know, EtsyD has been in a fun place over the years and we've kind of come and made asks from our you know, members when Cortex was in a weird situation. We've also kind of made ask, so just please come to us and we're literally happy to have those like weird tough conversations with companies. I think one of the things that Dims would really help with that longevity of Kubernetes and really working with end users specifically, that's the folks that I mostly work with. I'll still talk to the, you know, super big cloud and all of those people, but end users are just, they're so busy. So trying to, and I've had many conversations with GV with Bob about some of this is just figuring out how to increase velocity of opening up issues, tagging things correctly. Something as simple as that so that it goes to the right team. And then creating some more information and like programs like Zero and Emerge, we're teaching people how to contribute. We want to show something past that where we apply knowledge from specific projects over, you know, at some point in time, hopefully this year. So that's the kind of thing where I really want to synthesize that information down and get that out to end users because as we grow projects, we run into discoverability problems. As we keep growing, finding the right thing at the right time becomes that much more difficult. So taxonomies, all that fun, not so fun process stuff that makes sense to get together, then it's going to be a lot easier for us to have fun once we take care of all that work on that front. Hi, friends. All right. So I'm glad to see you all here and especially Taylor. I don't know if GV has informed you of how the AMA went this morning with the steering. I read all about it. It was crazy. It's great. Or if you saw the Twitter thread because I pinged you a lot. EU and the EU. It was clear that a lot of folks during the steering AMA were really interested in users and getting them involved with the community, getting feedback from them, getting more contributors from end users. So there were a few things mentioned earlier that the CNCF does with end users to try to encourage them to interact with the community and contribute as part of the community. And I was wondering if you could give us an overview. Yeah, so the thing I'm really excited about is our end user tab and they're focused on reference architectures. There's so many conversations going on right now and we're running into not so much of a problem but just that decision paralysis, choice paralysis right now. It's like, what do we want to work on first? And Alelied is going to join me on stage on Thursday during that keynote to talk about the kind of why, what, where, when, how with the tab. So definitely stay tuned to that. We're going to go into a lot more detail than we have time for today. But really that's the thing is again be able to provide those resources to help people understand the space a little bit more. That's the number one thing that I run into when I talk with people is just not, just not knowing. Like, oh, I've heard about this thing. Is this the right thing? When projects release new releases, you know, V3 or even a bug fix or a minor, you know, minor patch, then is it worth upgrading? Do we wait? Those are the kinds of decisions that end users are trying to make. Then once they have that mastery of something and they've built that trust internally by iterating small to big to big to bigger, then they feel a lot more comfortable with contributing and working within that space. So yeah, lots of programs planned. The end user tab, I think is the key to the future when it comes to the end users. And it gives us a place to route context, complaints, feature additions, source gaps when you're not calling Chris. Yeah. In the XERD Emerge program, do you know how many people actually ended up like contributing upstream? Did any become, did any folks become like actual? I mean, I know Kubernetes like, hey, I want more contributors, but I think in reality you really want like full-time maintainers that are paid at the end of the day. So do you have any data or stats of how that's working? Yeah, yeah. So we've collected some. We haven't collected everything, but I think out of the 362 people, we had about 25 to 30 get pull requests merged in, far more open them, but they didn't get accepted for various reasons. Either it wasn't a good fit, just conversation. And that was still a success to people. And then some people even switched jobs based off of that. And I was like, yes. You know, I get very excited when that happens. Oh, sorry. Jeefy, do you want to say something else? A little bit. Really quick. I think another thing to consider is what is the bar barrier to entry with contributing to projects? Every single project is going to be different. Kubernetes, right? And we've been seeing this. We've been talking about it. I know Bob and others have been trying to work on this for like half a decade at this point. And there isn't really going to be a right answer. It's going to be a moving target. But there needs to be a sweet spot where you have a low enough barrier to entry that, you know, talented, smart people can come in and actually contribute and do meaningful contributions and grow, but also high enough where you're not getting folks that are actually going to be a detriment to the project. And that's kind of a tough thing to talk about, but it is something to openly address and accept because we all want this project, all of our projects to continue to grow. And there's no one right answer for each project. Sparked an idea head to head. This happens all the time. When it comes to, I think it was you that was talking to some of the zero and emerge people or was talking to Bob or something like that. And really just dialing into what people's intent is, is it why do you want to contribute to open source? Because it's cool because you want a job. Like there's many reasons why do you want to contribute and be honest with yourself so that we can find out what, how to make that happen. That's the only way that it can happen. But if you're trying to aim for something and nothing will connect unless you're being honest on that front too. And it's like all answers are okay. We can find these pads. When it comes to different projects too like graduated incubating in sandbox. Sandbox, you were saying that like you can have a bigger impact because it's not fully baked yet. It's still kind of gooey in the middle. Some people like that. You know, I like my chocolate chips that way. But projects like Kubernetes have a very well established governance structure. They have everything. It's like a lot more hardened. And so there's a lot clearer pads because they've been working on that for so much longer. So again, question the intent around what, what, what do you feel like? What do you want to get involved with? You want the hardened true path where all the, you know, all the trails are worn in or do you want to something that's a little bit new? Last thing and then I'll leave. Well, not leave. You know what I mean. I think most people here know George. So this will ring true. George had actually the best description about this. You don't start learning to play guitar and then immediately want to play in Metallica. So don't start learning Golang and then immediately want to go and contribute into Kubernetes. You're not going to have a good time. So that's, that's just like one good example, but it really is a pretty good one. Okay. Just a, I know, but I'm usurping because I have anonymous questions. Okay. At natali on the Kubernetes Slack, if you need to want to ask these, I'd like to read out this question. KubeCon and the contributors summit are the most important events of the year for contributors to CNCF projects as they're a place where most of us can meet in the same place. Many of us are members of marginalized communities and can't safely visit places like Salt Lake City. So we have to miss out on that critical time. How is the CNCF thinking about that for future event plans and what is the plan for covering gaps that will be left in SLC for projects with leadership, with leadership that won't be able to travel? I mean, it's, you know, to basically describe how, you know, events work, you know, from both the Linux Foundation CNCF perspective, stuff like this event, for example, was planned probably roughly three years ago and booked and so on. So, you know, sometimes it's difficult to predict, you know, what happens from, like a local regulation or political, you know, per perspective when we're evaluating at least Salt Lake at the time seemed okay. But, you know, obviously things potentially change. One great thing about what we do is there are now four big KubeCons a year. So we do KubeCon US, KubeCon Europe, KubeCon India now, KubeCon China. We have cube days that are available with KCD. So there's generally, like, we are trying to build more of these in different locations to try to accommodate people in local, you know, areas. Are we going to be perfect, you know, every time? No, we make mistakes and, you know, happy to take feedback, but we truly are trying to be very, kind of, you know, globally minded and regionally, you know, focused in some ways. Go ahead. And, like, I'll acknowledge that. Like, that, like, this is a hard thing to be able to not be at, like, the same places. So, I mean, actually, like, KubeCon in and of itself is kind of like, it's really overwhelming. There's a lot to it. So I think I would encourage projects to also look at, like, open source summit North America and, like, kind of, some of the other places to be connected with each other as well. So, yeah. Thank you for the question. Hopefully that answered that. But we do plan two, three years in advance. And, you know, we already have locations planned for the next probably two, three years that I won't reveal, but generally in very nice locations. But conference planning for anyone who has been a conference organizer is it's a ton of, like, underappreciated, you know, work, right? And it's hard to always predict how large or small these events or a pandemic comes out of nowhere. So it's not the easiest thing in the world. But we're happy to take feedback. Okay. Now I think you can go. This is actually peeking back off something we were talking about earlier with talking to, you know, members when we want to potentially engage about something. Yes. But, like, what sort of, you know, information or, like, what is it that the projects could do better to, like, help you in those conversations and sort of, like, help encourage them to contribute and help, you know, with, you know, getting them on boarded actually as, you know, contributing members and not just sort of members of the foundation. Inherently, well, it would, if there's, yeah, it's a little bit, it's going to be unique to different cases. I'll give you some examples. Like, you know, there's some projects that are like, this company is a huge user. They open a ton of issues, but they don't contribute anything back. Issues are contributions, but they actually don't contribute, like, maintainers or anything like that. Like, having, surfacing that information towards us is useful because we do, like, check-ins with members all the times and we kind of tell them, hey, you should go look at this. Sometimes it's even flipped over where we have, like, members will complain that, like, hey, we try to contribute to Kubernetes, but the bar, like, to GV's point, sometimes it's hard to become, you know, a reviewer or a maintainer and so on. It's just very hard to decipher and then we'll be like, have you been to a contributor summit? And they'll be like, no, or hey, I tried to apply, but for some reason I'd, like, it's, the basic point I'm saying is, like, the more you kind of, you know, give us exact information of kind of what you're looking for, you know, the more useful it is for us when we have these conversations, other things I know sometimes it's hard for maintainers to allocate time for, like, mentorships or, like, you know, we do a lot of mentoring programs that we fund, that tends to be very, very, you know, valuable in ensuring that if your project could actually mentor someone and have them contribute successfully over a time span of two to three months, that means you're probably pretty open to receiving new contributors. We have projects that aren't good at that and that's usually a flag for us that we kind of investigate, but if you can make time and support mentoring within your community, that's always appreciated, but I know people are, you know, it's a time commitment. It's like having an intern. It's lovely sometimes. Hi, my name's Alistair. End user, oh, here, sorry. Oh, sorry. Here you go, Chris. Yeah, I'm an end user and I wanted to come back to that because, yeah, it came up in steering. So firstly, I want to acknowledge the amazing work that's happened in the last, I'd say, two years around Contrabex and making it easier to contribute and providing pass. Yeah, some of it's people like Taylor. I just, I just, I just write puns. That's what I'm, but things like making the docs better. And yeah, it's been great. There is, in my mind, still a gap for smaller end user companies who are trying to get support for features or projects that they use that, frankly, larger vendors might not care about or whatever. Some end users are big enough that they can indeed provide full-time maintainers, as you said, the valuable type of contributor to take care of those things. And I think you've outlined the past of that. But one idea that was floated is, sorry, I've skipped a lot of things here. Yeah, so one thing that came up was that companies and user members often think that their sponsorship money goes to projects and goes to supporting those things. An idea that came up was like, what if it did? Has that been considered? And if so, what would that look like? Oh yeah, it's, there's been, I think that that's a story that's been told for a while. And when it comes to paying people what they're worth and taking a look at all this money, it doesn't have that kind of benefit. And again, kind of like was being said with events and contracts and things like that, security audits cost a lot of money. Hosting things rebuilds cost a lot of money. So there are all these hidden scholarships running events like this where there isn't, there isn't that positive, but it's not, it just costs a lot of money to keep these wheels turning. And so from what, and that's kind of been, you know, I asked the same questions before coming to the CNCF and once I got to see behind the curtain, I was like, oh my gosh, that's a lot of machinery. So when it comes to what, that's why it helps us to get that kind of feedback around how do we dial in what the community needs because we want to help make that happen too. The end user tab is a direct result of that where we were saying, okay, it's the three pillars of the CNCF are the governing board, technical oversight committee, and then end users, which is great, but we didn't really have a body to handle that, to identify gaps, to be able to talk to, to get survey data from. Now we do. And they're focusing on helping deliver some of those things for end users specifically. I think like, you know, people may not be aware, but we do fund a lot of like work behind the scenes in terms of way of folks that work on documentation and help coordinate, you know, internships, a lot of things, but generally not like, they're usually more like short time focused kind of goals, usually sometimes if there's, you know, previously, we've hired some folks that literally worked on Kubernetes documentation a while ago because it was such a rough, you know, spot that it became a board level topic. And if there are things that are very specific and painful that could be, you know, gapped in a certain amount of time, like we'd love to hear that and we could try to do our best to, you know, facilitate either us coming in and helping a little bit, or trying to convince companies to kind of pitch in and solve that problem. So those are like legit dollars that go to things that do benefit projects. Thanks. We have more anonymous questions coming in, so I'm going to keep it rolling at NATALI on the Kubernetes Slack. Liability insurance for contributors and leads has been a repeated concern. Now that the SolarWinds CISO has been named in a lawsuit by the US SEC, companies are scrutinizing their OSS risks. Regulation is coming. How do we find pathways to minimizing risks to our leads? In the past, we talked about code of conduct committee, but security response community may be on a personal liability path now to help. It's a little complicated. Like if you're, it's like, I need to call my lawyer, but if you're individually contributing, then yes, you can potentially talk to us and we can go kind of try to figure something out, but if you're contributing on behalf or working with your employer, like you, you, it's your employer's responsibility at the end of the day. And we have had this, I think, discussion in public where we did outlines and guidelines for folks and if there was individuals that were, you know, contributing on their own or have their own little thing, reach out to us and we kind of see what we could help, but generally, a good chunk of the contributions are coming from folks that are, you know, it's your, like we necessarily can't necessarily be your lawyer, but we could potentially help out folks that are individual contributors on their own. We could potentially set something up, but it is generally, you are generally covered by your employer in that regard. I don't know if that makes sense, but there is a GitHub issue open where we discuss this. Actually, I think we, to my knowledge, I think we actually wrote this down on the foundation repo. It should, yeah. Yeah. I think, like, you know, it's an anonymous question, but happy to be able to like take questions later. There is a, it is, we do have documentation on it. Okay. Okay. So to the person who wants to follow up, feel free to, text me again, if you need to. Okay. I have another anonymous question. Is there an interest to highlight companies, we spoke about this a little earlier, that contribute to a project rather than those that are buying a bigger sponsorship package? Yeah. Absolutely. I think, yeah. One of the acronyms that we developed at the CNCF was cloud native should be nice. You should have networking, impact, comprehension, and elevation, because this is a lot of hard work. It's a very few amount of people doing a lot of hard work, empowering all of these hundreds of thousands of millions of people to be able to make these workloads come together. So we want to elevate you. We want to put the spotlight on you because it is freaking hard work. We're looking at doing other maintainer focused events. And one of the things that we've been kicking around is you can't sponsor it unless you're actually putting engineers where, you know, we're trying to put them. So that's another possible way where we can highlight. Yep. You are actually contributing to open source. You are helping the ecosystem. And you can sponsor the same event or this event that actually enriches the maintainer ecosystem. And if you have like a word ideas, let me know because like, you know, we're always happy to kind of highlight, you know, come up with a new award, like someone in the community suggested, why don't you highlight like people who do documentation work and hence top documentarian, you know, was born if there is something we could kind of say like about top contributing company or like come up with maybe something a little bit wittier than that, we would happily, you know, highlight them in a more visible, visible fashion. Okay. Let's go to, yeah. Thanks, Mario. Let's go to a real person in the room question and then I have more anonymous ones. All right. Are those coming from chat, GPT? So kind of a follow up to what Alistair was saying. We've heard from a few companies and end users that they don't really want, they don't have the funds or they don't want to employ a maintainer or a engineer, but we've heard from people that would be happy to employ a tender or half of an engineer. How can the CNCF kind of like facilitate that with like maintainer funds that people can put towards that type of thing? You know, if there was a concrete case where there's enough companies that wanted to do this and pull resources to potentially contract folks that do specific work, we could, I mean, I'm open to trying something, I would have to just get enough critical mass to make that, you know, happen. And the upside sounds like a great idea in reality, I'm like how long would, like I'm always worried like how long would companies willing to do this? Are they going to leave us, you know, potentially with the bags to kind of, you know, handle if when things go bad, but happy, happy to, happy to try it if you have enough. Kind of along those same lines in academia, there are, you know, short-term positions, but they still commit to, two to three years. We would need that because if all of a sudden, you know, a company pulls out, I'm kind of saying what Chris said, but like, there's precedent here in academia with, you know, short-term contracts. And I like that model because it gives you a chance to be able to say, this is a well-defined scope. Because I think that's where I love the idea, but I'm also worried about like, I've seen you all, you all take on way too much when you get the opportunity. Yeah, right? Right, like, and I, I'd want to be very careful and measured, really, in terms of what what does the company get out of it? What do the people get out of it? What's the long-term impact? Yeah, like, what are the outcomes that you would want out of this? And having those conversations might lead us to something that could be doable in the short-term and then doable in the, like the medium term as well. And I'm thinking medium term is now like five years, like, scary here. So yeah, the willing to experiment, let's see if we could potentially come up with something, but a lot of companies are inherently greedy at the end of the day, right? And kind of want to maximize the most they can without, you know, paying. And we see this, you know, all the time in, yeah, like with scholarships, there are certain companies that will remain nameless that have, are worth trillions of dollars that have asked for way too many scholarships, in my opinion, but it, like... I think what you're hearing up here is violent enthusiasm with tempered wish for outcomes, because again, I want it to be able to be good for everyone and not just like, oh, wait, we trade this idea once. Okay. Okay. I have the mic now. As I know, for next time, retro people on the Contrary Summit, we need an anonymous form. My DMs are blowing up. Okay. Oh, I love this. Okay. All right. Next question. 180 projects and counting. 84. 184 projects and counting. When does it end? What's the goal for the CNCF community and what happens when some of these projects inevitably get archived or abandoned? What happens to the users they might have? Yeah, actually, I think we all have different opinions on this. I think it's... That's a wonderful pipeline to be able to have. So many people want to be able to come be part of the ecosystem and kind of stepping towards that. And I think it is a very, very good thing for us to be able to have those projects. I also think that there needs to be a pathway for, well, yeah, not everything is going to succeed. How do we merge? How do we like bring work streams together? This is something that TOC is definitely focused on for the next cycle, looking to Dems. And being able to say what do we do as we move forward? Again, I think it's great. I think there's some other opinions here. You know, I think historically we just truly listen to what our community and members want. And the TOC, which some of you in this room are part of, kind of make that decision. When CNCF first started in 2015, if you go back through the original charter, there was this terrible architecture diagram that was part of it. Like, here's what's in scope. Here's what's not in scope. In the beginning, container runtimes were out of scope. Like, you know, we didn't have container D or Creo any of these things. That was considered out of scope, but eventually people decided that, like, hey, this potentially could be a good thing to kind of bring these in together and kind of bring some sanity to the container wars or whatever you want to call them at the time. And over time, we've kind of just evolved with our community members and what they want. So that's, I kind of see it as cloud native evolves over time with what people want to get out of it. And we shouldn't necessarily be static. Will projects fail? Sure. That's just, that's just life. We'll do our best to kind of support them. But, you know, the TOC is the body at the end of the day that kind of makes that, that call or not. I think that it's like, like, like we said, I like that we see our pipeline increasing rather than plateauing or starting to take a dive. I like seeing that not everything is homogenous and the same. Different industries solve similar problems differently. So by having this variety, you know, if a project fails, that can be okay. It's just that it's my hope that people don't lose that momentum and that energy because you can take that. Even if a project fails, there's a lot of things that you've learned, right? You understand how to work with community. You understand how to work with issues, pull requests. That's not lost knowledge. If you, you know, same thing with business. If you fail a business, you're not just, you know, you're a bummer forever. No, you've learned a lot through that process. So thinking big, thinking bigger on how to apply that to the whole of the ecosystem would be, that's how I feel. So I think it's good to see the projects increase personally. I think that, you know, I'm guilty of thinking about projects like, do we need that? Wait a minute. But I just don't, I just might not understand that. It's people that I talked to. It's a core need. And I'll do the concrete example because I was so heavily involved in the container D, you know, rocket situation. Like we had three run times. Container D, rocket and Creo. Rocket eventually kind of got abandoned. Maybe it's like the nice way I could kind of put it. And, you know, container D when it first came in the CNCF was actually, you know, almost like BDFL model. Basically there was one person that could basically approve or control everything. But that project eventually evolved and became healthier through its time in CNCF. And now we're kind of left with two very, very solid, you know, container, you know, run times in much better shape than we were before. So I think overall, end users are in a better, you know, situation through that kind of competition and natural evolution of technology. I forget where this ends, but I'm just going to keep asking questions until someone tells me to stop. Okay. Cool. So I want to, we're going back to revisit the question around travel to places like Salt Lake City. And so this is a follow-up there. Are you suggesting that all SIGs and projects get all the things that they need to get done? Sorry. Are you suggesting that all SIGs and projects get all the things done that we won't be able to do at some other Linux Foundation conference? Where are those conferences? What do we do if we can't travel there either? What is the plan? So events.linuxfoundation.org has all the events that we have announced and planned. Hopefully it's diverse enough where we can actually go and attend. But generally, geez. So I don't really have a good answer for this. You know, this isn't one of my strong suits. I tend to say things I shouldn't. Chris wants to tackle me off the stage. We try to plan events as best we can. We have, in my opinion, having dealt with events outside of the LF and then here, one of the best events teams I've ever seen. For the record, we should all go give them hugs. Not all at once. But here's a good example. Let's use Salt Lake City as a good example because that's kind of the hot topic. If you look at news articles from just as recent as like two years ago, it was one of the most safe and lauded as the best LGBTQ city in the world. So we planned an event there and now there's political issues just in the state, not the city, right? Or is it the city, not the state? Point is completely out of our control. Now, what do we do? Do we now abandon like three years' worth of work? We can't do that because we're beholden to multiple contracts and also think about the community, the LGBTQ community that's there. Like, if we abandon that event, all of a sudden, how do they feel? Like, I don't know. It feels bad, but... You're ranting at this point. So it is. Yeah, we've got another question coming up. Yeah, and at the end of the day, it's like we're willing to... Like, you know, if there is a particular QCon or other event that folks want to do something and gather, we're always happy to like accommodate, but please kind of, you know, work with us and let us know. Like, we do probably 100 plus events a year across the world and it's foundation of variety of different geographies. Oh, we've got a question over here. Sorry. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what happened with Lincardie but not really specific people born generally of so, graduation criteria, monitoring projects from CNCF site, but also on the other hand, from company side, like what they can do to remain sustainable. Like if they have to do such steps, there must be a reason and the reason's obvious. So how can they survive as well? So I guess the question is like, what can... As an organization, there's like only... It's like, we cannot guarantee companies financial success. I think a lot of people rely on us to ensure that the projects that we host are healthy, diverse in terms of governance and maintainers from different organizations. The lesson with that one, like I don't want to speak on behalf of the TOC, which really kind of is the arbiter of that. I think with some projects, what happens is, Lincardie when they first graduated, we're in a decent situation. They met the requirements we had at the time with the TOC installed at the time. But what happens is after a project graduates, we don't really have what would be like equivalent like a heartbeat mechanism, right, to kind of go and check on them. And some projects probably don't do well over time or something happens or the economy changes so they kind of get in a rough shape. And so this has kind of been very active discussions amongst the TOC of like, how do we prevent this potentially from happening again? What can we do to improve this? How can we potentially help organizations there? But I think it's active under discussion. Because there's two sides. There's like the company that's paying the majority of the maintainers on the project. And then there are end users who are pissed off because they assume that any graduate and CNCF project is like going to look forever and be the best in the world, right? And we hear it from both sides. Like it's a tough, tough situation. Do we have a session where we'll talk about those points which actually discuss? We have a TOC meeting on, TOC panel on Friday might be a good place to be able to bring this because realistically, like that is the body. Like you've got the wrong people up on stage for this. We can speak to it, but we're kind of wrong for that. Okay, we had other questions. Oh, yes, go ahead. Hi there. So I don't know about conferences and where they should be held, right? North America has three countries, but I've yet to see an event in Mexico. So what's, what are you going to do about that? Trust me, my heart is in Mexico for sure. I'm there quite often. So the challenging thing is a lot of people, you know, at KubeCon it's always funny. I've met a handful of people already, like, why don't you do something in Budapest? Why don't you do something in Vienna? And the conference planning game is not easy for us. If your conference is about 5,000 people, all of a sudden the amount of spaces start kind of dwindling across the world. And we also do compete with VMware, Red Hat. Like there's a lot of competition and timing is difficult because we do so many KubeCons. We need to make sure there's enough space between them. Some of the venues that we are trying to choose, like, oh, you could fit 30,000 people. Amazing. But your expo hall is too small for the amount of sponsors and project pavilions we have. So it's like, it's like the worst Jenga puzzle thing to kind of, you know, deal with and expectations are high all over the place. Like if you ever, I know there's some folks in the Kubernetes community that have planned events and so on, so they can maybe sympathize a little bit, but it's difficult. We do try to rotate new cities all the time if we can, but it's like, it's a hard problem. If you have ideas of like, you should truly go to, you know, do something in, I don't know, Melbourne or Sydney or something. Let us know. And like, and if the venue could hold, it refers us this and our events team literally puts it on the list of stuff they look at. But it is not an easy problem when you have large scale, you know, events. And sometimes we're like, found the most amazing venue in like Lisbon, but the dates are wrong and would be way too close to like another KubeCon. So it's a tough problem, but we always take suggestions on places and events to, or event venues to host things. Okay. Staying on the event side of things. Why is Contributor Summit at the same time as co-located events? Many members of the community have to choose between the two or have speaking commitments elsewhere. I'll give it to you if you feel like, do we want to, do we want KubeCon to go back to five days? Total the whole week? I don't know. I'm open to ideas. So one of the things that we're going to try and pilot at KubeCon India is a maintainer summit. I kind of alluded to this earlier. Now the idea here is this is going to be a completely separate day before Colos, but it's going to have more projects, not just Kubernetes, but it's going to have also a lot more space. So it's going to be a nice single maintainer only. There's not going to be, you know, a vendor hall or anything like that. Just maintainers able to talk and collaborate. So we're trying to address that because one of the biggest pieces of feedback we hear every year is I love the contributor summit and I got to attend the intro and one talk and then I had to run over to a vendor room. So we're trying. Oh yes. Just reading my phone and not paying attention. I just wanted to say specifically for, you know, as a member of the summit team, there actually was an attempt to make this contributor summit happen on Monday and the venue fell through. Correct. And we are for SLC, last I heard, trying to do that as well because we had more lead time, but we do try and do as much planning as we can ahead of time, but the events team does kind of have to focus on the first event before they focus on the next event. So. Any in-person questions before I get another one on? We're going back to the SLC topic. Are you saying, I mean, you wanted a spot. Yo, okay. Are you saying there is no plan and that already busy marginalized folks have to have to figure it out for themselves? The plan is we are happy to accommodate. Please let us know what. Got it. What, what, what you need. Okay. Okay. So the people that are asking it, wait, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the people that are asking about this. What it sounds like I'm hearing is that maybe what the accommodations that they're looking for should be sent to you. Or, yeah, I'm saying, yeah. Okay. Okay. Talk about it. Great. I think, I think what these questions are getting at is what are the next steps? Yeah. To possibly solve this for future. Yep. Okay. Cool. Anonymous questions at natali on the Kubernetes Slack. Any more in person here? Eddie, yeah. Thanks, Mario. Dev stats is rad. I know, I know a lot of people look at dev stats and and use dev stats to kind of show impact and show value and, you know, why we contribute and where we contribute. How can we do more with that data? How can we like the top contributors and the smaller companies that are percentage come, you know, contributing are better surfaced and like change the incentive value of maybe they get, I don't know, like discounts on sponsorship or just some sort of other thing that we can like surface that. Sounds like a good idea. Like we're always trying to improve insights. Like dev stats has been serving CNCF for many, many years, including the Kubernetes community. We're building some new kind of insights infrastructure too. Like if you have, if you have ideas like that, hey, maybe top new award top, you know, Kubernetes contributing company of the year and they get some discounts. Just like we love to hear ideas like that. Like we, we always have like crazy, you know, ideas amongst like our little slack and conversations amongst the staff, but hearing it from you we're more than happy to, to like please bring the crazy ideas like we're like, and we'll build new dashboards. We're actually spending a lot of money on, you know, trying to build a new insights infrastructure because the hardest problem is you laugh, but like, you know, figuring out a lot of companies come to us and it was like, you know, very large ones. Like we actually don't know where our employees are contributing to projects. We would actually like to know this and it's very difficult sometimes to track affiliations because sometimes maintainers just like whatever, use their Gmail or they just don't give a, you know, crap about things and it's a whole other problem that we're trying to, to solve. All right, there's, there's a, yeah. I, I have also one. Okay. Yeah. Let me jump in. Yeah. Dev stats is horrible to maintain. So I wrote, I wrote basically I asked Bob to explain me how I get my employees into Dev stats so that we can track it accordingly. And then it was like three people taught me three information. Like first one told me go into your Linux profile, put your connected to GitHub, then it's fine. Apparently it's not. So can we, yeah, can we fix this? So there's, I think we actually as part of the new effort in contributor strategy for documentation, I think there is documentation of how to properly update your profiles, but there should be two locations, cncf slash get dm where affiliations are historically stored and open profile that Dev is where the LFX insights things, but it is a, it's not easy. At the end of the day. Sorry, Josh, you're gonna. Yeah. So since it came up. So we're being told like, like I've been being offered a lot of tools from the Linux Foundation LFX team to replace some older tools that we have. I mean, I'll actually speak as one of the people who helped build Dev stats. Dev stats is really at the end of his lifetime. We didn't know what we were building when we started out. And it was a much harder problem than we realized. And like, if you got me and Lucas and a couple of other people together to fix it, we would start out by building a new one. The end, but we're being offered a lot of things like LFX insights, for example, where there's a lot of problems with the tool and the team that's building the tool are unresponsive to feedback. The, and I'm a little concerned that tools that we have that are not ideal, but are adequate are going to be replaced with tools that don't work at all. So I agree with you in some ways. Like we will not move off of Dev stats until the Kubernetes and the rest of CNCF community would be happy with a replacement for sure. Like no, no question. And then to Josh's point, you know, we do employ Lucas and others that kind of work on this kind of tool behind the scenes. So yeah, trust me, like until y'all happy with it and I'm actually happy with it, we're not moving off of Dev stats. So I wouldn't worry about there. But building insights is if you have ideas, let me know. But the question is is like, you know, the communication between the team building it and so on, we could hopefully fix that like when trying to push them to do meetings in the open and respond to discourse. But it's the person like if you look at Dev stats, most of the persona is like usually developers, maintainers are interested. Insights is trying to like cover developers, maintainers, people like companies that want to know what their employees are up to. And just it's trying to do a lot of personas and it's hard to kind of have like one UI that does it all. But please give us feedbacks, but we're not going to move off of the existing tool chain until the new one meets everyone's requirements. And I know Kubernetes, I know we're planning to get Kubernetes potentially onboarded on insights and that start that feed by feed feedback cycle soonish. Yes. Yeah. After two times. Yeah. After event, event, event time, for sure. One, one, one just quick thing following all this, like I highly, highly recommend just adding as part of like your employee onboarding. Go update, get DM. Yeah. Go update, open profile, because that has, I've had to tell a lot of people on how to do that. Okay. We are at five minutes left until the end of this panel. So if you've got any questions in the room, now is the time to ask. I'm going to go back to the anonymous questions here. Going back to the idea of number of projects in CNCF, 180 plus projects is a lot and it's covering a large domain space. Are there concerns about the CNCF spreading its resources too thin trying to support all of these? Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a, I think it's somewhat valid concern, but you know, each project's a little bit different in terms of the resources that require. Or, you know, what's interesting is like, I don't hear people like asking that question to like the Apache Foundation or Clips Foundation in some way. Apache has, I don't know, probably five, it's on a project. Clips has 3, 400, right? So CNCF still has less projects than, and for those that generally don't know, we don't do too much for sandbox projects at all. So they're not really a resource in a sense of things. The incubating graduated projects, for sure, we do a lot more, you know, they're like security audits aren't the cheapest thing, you know, in the world. You know, maintainers, all the stuff does, does add up. Right now, we're not worried about it, but there may be a time in the future, but we generally all kind of work together and kind of figure it out where we, we really are trying to kind of build a foundation where we actually do more for projects than to just simply be like a get repository, get a post. So right now, it's not a concern at least from, from my, from my perspective, at least. Go for it. Oh no, we're, we're going to Minnesota each other, you first. Okay. So I was actually going to say like, you have asked for feedback multiple times, what is the best way to actually give that to you? There's surveys, we do surveys, yes, please do surveys. If there's more immediate feedback. I'm thinking like, you know, they asked for suggestions. Yes. The ideas, I would say projects at CNCF.io. Individually, like a lot of us, you know, like you could slack, you could find an email, like even at, even at cube con, like I'm always happy to try to make time, even though, you know, we have crazy schedules here. Like I truly try to make my, you know, calendar and publicly stuff available and make time to talk to, you know, maintainers especially. So, projects at CNCF.io, we all read, but we do try to take time individually too. All right. Thank you all for joining. Thanks everyone here for joining, asking questions anonymously and not for the folks who sent me anonymous questions. Thanks for your trust. Go ahead and delete those messages. And again, I really appreciate you coming and to answer some questions. I know Chris, you and I spoke yesterday, you wanted something spicy, so I had to, you know, hold up our end of the bargain, but at the same time, at the same time, I feel like what this means is that you've got a lot of concern from a community, because they really care about this project, this space. And I think that's a lot of the overwhelming message here. Awesome. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks. And Xander, I'd love you to close us out.