 Okay, so welcome everyone to our talk today. We are going to talk about Tag Contributor Strategy, which is a CNCF technical advisory group focused on things like project governance, mentoring, contributor growth. So basically the work that we do is we help maintainers of CNCF projects be successful. And you'll learn a lot more about what all of this is as we go through the panel. So let's just start. Catherine, why don't you talk a little bit about what you've been working on within the tag? Sure. I started out by joining the contributor growth working group. I had just joined Boyant, the creator of LinkerD, was totally new to cloud, not cloud native to open source. And yeah, I needed to know a little bit more about community and how that all works. And so what the working group basically does, it creates resources for maintainers around that cover governance, security, project health, and much more. But my background is in marketing. So at some point I shifted a little bit. And now I'm focused on helping get a little bit more visibility to the tag because they do amazing work. It's super important. More projects should know about it. So that's what I'm focusing right now. But let's talk a little bit about mentoring. And so Nate, you lead the mentoring effort from the CNCF side. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Hi, yeah, I'm Nate. And I'm a developer advocate with the CNCF. And part of that means that I got to, I don't like to say that I lead it. I help run it with this guy, Jay, as a co-chair. And what we do in the mentoring working group is help projects to find new contributors through mentorship. So we help write up proposals and help organize our projects to participate in things like Google Summer of Code or Outreachy or Season of Docs. And we also have our own internal, as a part of the Linux Foundation, we run mentorship programs three times a year with the LFX Mentorship Program. So these are paid menteeships. So people who are the mentees actually get between something like $3,000 and $6,000 US depending on where they're living. And it's a great way to have our projects reach out into the community and try and grow folks in a way where it's a sustainable, inclusive program that we can continue to run for folks. And of course, I already spilled it. Jay here is as my co-chair and has been doing a lot of interesting things in New Zealand specifically. Would you like to tell us about your efforts? I'm a co-chair alongside Nate from the Mentoring Working Group. I also work with IINZ. who invited me to try and create pathways for Māori into open source and hopefully develop a mentoring initiative out of that but we found that came with its own challenges because not a lot of people are familiar with open source or cloud in general back in New Zealand and there's really low participation rates of indigenous there as well so I guess we adopted a contextualised design think approach and tried to develop a lot of strategic partnerships working with education and industry and community groups like the government to see how we could take another approach of doing that so being running like events and meetups and exhibitions including learning resources and all sorts of things to try and raise awareness and capability and now working with also working with Māori Economic Development Agency called Toi Karawa and we're working with about 30 schools across the region to look at approaching it from an education perspective as well so lots of good learning and I guess the approach is to go wide and keep it really intentional and with the expectation that creating that foundation collaboratively alongside others in the community is going to help to eventually develop a program out of that so yeah Dave you're doing some awesome stuff with the maintainer circles so do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah sure so I'm Dave Sudea and yeah I'm currently one of the people trying to facilitate maintainer circles within the tag what those are are they're sort of like educational sessions and round tables for maintainers and there's a broad umbrella there it's really like decision-makers it didn't have to be like the person on the maintainer list necessarily within the projects I actually just facilitated my first one yesterday and it was on with Rin here and who ran it and so they were talking about how to improve like end user relationships and how to bring end users into your project and help that communication be successful there's also been ones prior to my time on managing burnout on integrating like the inclusive language standards into your project that sort of thing and there there's usually sort of some educational presentation but then it really is you know a space to be open conversations among maintainers so that they can problem solve together discuss the issues that they're having and help each other work on them so if you miss that one we're hopefully going to be doing them online once a month ish and then we'll have them at coup cons as well in person Josh you started the tag and talk about you know why and what you know if you're if you are accomplishing what you set out to do well thank you so prior to starting this tag I and my co-founders Paris Pittman had worked a lot in the contributor experience sake of Kubernetes and we looked at a lot of the stuff that we're doing to organize Kubernetes as a community and feeling that the rest of the CNC a projects really needed that and that we figured a bunch of things out in a way that we could actually template them and and like write down advisory documents and help set up processes that other projects including a lot of smaller projects with a lot fuel resources could potentially follow in order to have a well-run project this really appeals a long background also in ops and this really appeals to me for two reasons one is that it's your basic sort of DevOps principle which is you know everything that you can automate should be automated and and if it's not automated it should least be a template and I feel that really extends and it's been very gratifying we've had a kiosk here and I've had a couple projects but I hadn't spoken to at all walk up to me and talk about which of our resources they were using which is perfect the the other reason why it's been super helpful is that this is something I also do for Red Hat I'm in the Red Hat open source practice office and so I actually need to assist and support a lot of projects you know used to be you're involved with open source project you'd evolve with one project I'm involved with a couple of dozen and and at that scale you can't have a lot of sort of hand crafting of everything you need to come up with systems that work and so working through tag computer strategy has really been helpful in terms of defining those both for the CNCF projects and for the other projects that I work with so one of the big areas we've been templating stuff is governance working group and my main collaborative there is Dawn so don't you want to talk a little bit about how you got involved in that and and why you're still involved in that yeah absolutely so I actually so my my day job is I work at VMware and I'm responsible for our open source community strategy within the company so I saw this contributor strategy tag and I was like oh that sounds like something I should get involved in so I showed up to a meeting a Paris pitman looked at me and she said hey we need someone to write the project health like how you measure project health guide and you know a lot about metrics you should do that and I was like okay now that sounds like fun so I gotta kind of get started that way so I wrote the project health measurement guide and then I saw the work that Josh was doing in governance which is something that I find really really interesting like how do you how do you have well-run projects so I started getting more and more involved in in the governance working group and then getting involved in things like you know building templates and how to use so that's what's kind of kept me engaged in in the tag Nate what about you yeah so I started at the CNC a couple of years ago as a technical technical writer primarily and then last year Ukraine got invaded by Russia and one of my colleagues Ihor had to go and defend his country and he had been running the mentorship program up to that point and so my boss said hey could you can you help with this and immediately put my hand up and said yes absolutely I can help with this is something that is interesting to me so that's how I got into it and I got into it without really having any background in community organization and so at that point I said I'm gonna need some help here and so I looked at the tag and said can we can we make this a program for the community by the community and the that's that's how we got started with the working group how about you Dave how did you find this work yeah so I worked for best of labs we've done I did emissary ingress and telepresence to CNCF and and one of the reasons I joined the organization as I was an end user of those projects big fan I really wanted to help move them up the ladder through emissary is incubating telepresence sandbox and I wanted to help move them up and so one of the main requirements for that process is you need to have maintainers from multiple places and contributors so I thought well contributor strategy seems like the place where I would learn how to do that and so I showed up to meeting and and we were going down the agenda and Josh was like yeah we don't have anybody running maintainer circles right now and I raised my hand so it's that easy and yeah it's a that's how I get started well keeps me engaged I think you know I've been I was an end user for many years at coming to these and engaging the community and I think you know now being being allowed the time to be on the other side and really be involved in the community I think you know it's just such a great group of people and and in this tag in particular is a really great group of people and I love seeing them every month but you know I think the work like I ran my first main tender circle yesterday and I think you know just being in there and seeing how much the people who came appreciated the ability to bounce ideas off of each other and like this facilitating that improvement of these projects was really fulfilling and so I think you know yeah it was it's just a really good experience cool man yeah I was invited by my good friend and mentor happy hacker to to get involved and with pretty vague directions it was show up and and see I can serve pretty much and I guess what kept me there was you know that saying if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room I always feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be because it's a very very smart people and I don't have a team background it so there's a lot of learning a lot of times I was just you know trying to absorb as much as I could and you know just just try and glean what I could from a lot of experience and expertise but also feeling supported there's a lot of very passionate dedicated people who have been very accommodating and helped me to sort of get a better understanding of it and now for me I say this is a big opportunity for people not just in New Zealand but globally to sort of I guess redefine how get into the tech space and you know tag there's a lot of networks and experience and obviously they're really strong sense of community and then from Maridim you know we have values like knowing the tongue and to look kind of tainter and hotel to mentality basically how we can serve others and be disruptive innovative process and I see you know some alignment there where you know there's there's opportunity to make a difference so for me it's it's really easy to you know to keep showing up and say engage so I'm I'm grateful for that Catherine how about you yeah so as I mentioned before I had just joined a buoyant new to open source and needed to learn about community and work the work the joint the working group and so I created two resources I needed right so I need to learn have a broad overview of how communities work and so one thing that's really great about this tag is that it gives your resources to learn right like so I interviewed a bunch of maintainers from different projects who were very generous with their time shared best practices lessons learned and I summarize that and basically contributed that to the tag right and then I did another one we were we have a community CRM I'm familiar with CRM's not with community CRM's and I was like I'm not sure how this works so also did some interviews and two were with two founders from these from two different CRM's community CRM's so you really get the opportunity to talk to people who would otherwise not just talk to one person who wants to learn individually for their project but if you tell them hey I need to learn but I want to share that knowledge with the community suddenly people are very very willing to to talk to you and really take a lot of time and so and also like my like for me like the best way to learn is by well teaching others or kind of like like summarizing things like explaining things that you learned breaking that down and so for the process like like I learned a bunch from a lot of smart people and so that is something that I think is a huge value in this act you got the opportunity to do that as a member right but at some point as I mentioned I my background is in marketing so community is a part of it but it's not I'm not as in the weeds as other people here on this panel so at some point I was I didn't know how to contribute anymore to this tag and I felt a little bad and I don't want to be sitting in a meeting and not contributing because like I want to provide value and I don't think I mentioned that before to this group but I kind of wanted to leave because it was like there is not nothing more that I could do but I felt really bad because the tag was still new so not a lot of people were in the meetings everyone was so nice and I really believe in the mission I think it is such an important mission and and then I realized you know the reason I feel bad to leave is because there are a few people that is an awareness problem and guess what that's a marketing thing right so I was like oh you know what I can actually use my marketing skills to kind of help get more visibility to the tag and also know how to navigate the CNCF know a lot of people there from the marketing side and how we can leverage that so that's what I've been doing and what keeps me engaged of course like the people and again the mission I think it's so important we always talk about community but we're so much so focused on community within our projects but the CNCF is our home all these projects right and I think we need to do a better job and there's so much we can do if we really kind of create a cross project community where we all learn from each other we have so many open source projects and basically whatever challenge one project is facing today there's really good chances that someone else face them today so there's really no way and no need to reinvent the wheel each time so if we provide these platforms and the maintainer circles are like an amazing way to do that we really can learn from each other right and yeah so that's that's what keeps me engaged what about you Josh yeah well I just really like to see things run well I'm one of the people the that that there's something I always call the dirty sink principle which is that if you live with a bunch of roommates the person scrubbed the sink is the person who really can't stand a dirty sink I'm I am the person scrubbing the sink and so I want to set up some way that the sink gets clean regardless of whether or not I'm there and and you know in in terms of community management in terms of making sure the CNCF projects run well that's been tagged contributor strategy I did set up good systems to to set up ways that that the easier path is to run the projects well rather than that being the harder path and and for that matter it's not just doesn't just you know benefit me philosophically and like by a mental orientation it's also my job because my employer is heavily invested in the CNCF and we want to see projects there do well because it benefits our downstream business and and so you know at the scale of the CNCF is at the tag contributor strategy is really help me work with other people to develop systems and ideas and share knowledge to make sure that things work well so Nate how is how is your involvement with tag contributor strategy help you get your new job done for CNCF well that's and that's what I'm I'm also very lucky in that my job I work for the CNCF so this is this is all literally hey Nate do this so it's a part of but I tend to demure when people say oh yeah you lead the the the the mentorship program and part of that is because when I first started in on it right that was not a part of my skillset community management leadership I was always one of the folks doing stuff right not sort of trying to figure out how to help other people do things and for me one of the things that I gained from this group and and working with the the technology strategy is learning how to help folks help me to help other folks like if you can parse that you're doing well but it really is and it comes back to everybody's talking about community and it really is being able to to help people start on their careers which is a lot of what the mentorship wind up being but then helping other people sort of learn how to to coach and mentor is something that has really sort of I think for me and it's maybe not like I'm still in the same position that I once so this isn't necessarily help move my career yet but it's one of those things where I'm hoping that as I move through my career I'll take sort of the lessons learned here about leadership and and and helping and we'll be able to help help ensure that with other folks who help move their careers forward to me so Jay how about yourself how what have what have you learned doing all of this stuff what haven't I learned look I I feel like I stand on the shoulders of giants and as I mentioned before one one in particular is hippie who opened this world to me in the first place I don't have a tech background at all you know my experience to be with youth and career and community development so when I was invited to to be a part of this yeah I was pretty overwhelmed like really appreciate about the opportunity but really unsure about what it was I was able to do to you know there's going to be of any sort of value and one of the things that that have used to show me of is that you know it's not about technology it's about culture and I I really appreciate that that's you know continually sort of resonated in the sort of work and you know having support of of wider team and the tag obviously it's done a lot to obviously connect new people change my perspective I mean I'd never heard about open source before getting involved either and now I can see pretty much that like the transformational potential that it can you know bring to to schools and communities and businesses and having an opportunity to be part of that is huge so and I want to be able to bring that to other people as well you know this is my first KubeCon this is my first time in Europe we've just got a student and into the LFX mentorship there's another one following close behind now you know there's you know tertiary education providers looking at how they could you know have spring cloud into curriculum so I think you know I can see the changes saying to sort of take place and you know it's I guess I mean anything could go from here but the prospect of of looking at better ways in terms how to bring others into it is continually sort of motivating so yeah it's a big deal for me Dave it's your experience man yeah you know so if you were at karaoke last night you may have inferred that my original career attempt was rockstar but lead singer thank you blur but but you know as I went into my professional life I learned that professionally I I'm more of a drummer and I like facilitating other people's success before I was in tech I was public school teacher and then you know when I went into tech I ended up in DevOps and it's sort of you know like the engine that makes everyone else work better and so you know I think the the the next part of my career journey with this is really you know I think there's some phases at least for me in terms of engagement with the CNCF where it kind of came in I was like oh open source and submission and then you kind of go like but most of it's a vendor haul and then and then if you step further through that it's like oh but there really is a really cool mission here and people are doing amazing work and we all just really want to build cool stuff and support each other in doing that and I think but you don't get that unless you engage right and so I think that was the thing for me was the more that I engage the more I get back that feeling of like oh wow we're doing amazing work here we're empowering people and so so I think the thing that the learnings for me have been how to best do that in this organization like one of the very first things I did was remove people from a list that was done rudely I learned like oh okay here's how you operate in terms of communication and talking with people and and and one of the things I love about this organization is like no one got mad it was just like hey man that's not how we do things I was like oh okay cool right and you just and that's I think speaks to the quality of people here and then the organization brought you know largely so you know and then yeah I think the other piece of it is you too can raise your hand in a meeting and then two months later be featured on the CNCF keynote stage so be glad native famous yeah so yeah but I think it's it's just there there is so much to learn and to Jay's point you know there are there are so many people here who want to share knowledge and who want to who want to help you out so yeah what about you don't yeah so one of the really cool things about being in this particular tag is that you get to work across all of the CNCF projects so one of the things that that I've spent a lot of time learning and have been really fascinated by is just looking at in particular the governance work that we've done the templates the how-to's which which bits of those work well for certain projects which ones don't work well for others and so it's been a constant learning experience about what works well for certain types of projects and what doesn't which has allowed me to carry that back to VMware when I'm providing guidance for our own open source projects around things like governance and contributor growth so that's been really fascinating to be able to see this really at at CNCF scale so that that's the part I think that I've a lot of what I've learned and then from a you know from a career perspective just like the people you meet the networking I got to do a keynote at kubecon which I never thought I would get to do and it was directly related to the work that I do within this within this tag so I think from a career standpoint just the the network the people the the community I think is really beneficial from a from a career perspective Catherine how about you yeah I mean like I can only second that like it's really incredible how many people you get to meet from different companies from different backgrounds different countries and it's really rewarding you learn so much right and you really start building this amazing network and I feel like I don't know if I were to lose my job today you know like I have a bunch of people who know me in a professional setting who have seen my work ethic and doesn't guarantee that would I get a job right away but at least you know I know people would kind of make an effort right and and that is somehow like really reassuring right there and and I also think that there are like a lot of benefits from non-coat contributions that are not as prevalent in code contributions and Don already mentioned one she had a keynote yesterday Josh and I had one last kube cotton uh and uh no last year actually in Europe and and I don't know I had two years ago I've never done public speaking at all and it was crazy you know it's terrifying it was exciting an opportunity I never expected that to happen right being on this panel with amazing people sharing all our our experiences with you is is again rewarding it's great and as I mentioned like you meet people from over the world we have Jay here who is from New Zealand literally the other side of the world all of that is yeah very enriching and I think a lot of people think about when they think about contributing it's like giving right you are giving but I I don't know I feel like I'm getting so much more than I'm putting in so I don't know once you start it's almost like an addiction it's like you don't want to go back so on that note it's like yeah I mean like anyone here wants to join our tag you know like there are like all these places where you can find us it's yeah I I can only recommend it yeah of course it comes down to there's a reason we're telling you all this not not just to make you feel good but also because the CNCF has I don't know whatever is 150 something 160 something projects you know the you know a whole bunch of groups and committees all of those projects have their own individual needs most of them are led by technical maintainers who don't necessarily have a lot of time or energy to do management stuff and so we really need more people in the tag you know facilitating being that catalyst to help maintainers help each other and to help maintainers find the resources that they need and we've got a to-do list in the form of issues it's probably 40 50 issues long some of them quite substantial things you can pick up something today if you want to okay so we reached the end of our prepared questions and we have six more minutes if you all have any questions for us anybody want to ask a question yes wait we need a microphone for the recording thanks yeah so you know as a maintainer and steering committee member of a couple different projects I was very excited about this you know I've heard of the tag here before and I know a couple you as well and you know I know you all are doing good work but I haven't had a great amount of you know discoverability or visibility into the work I haven't actively sought it but you know I'm kind of wondering for next steps here to start taking advantage of all the wonderful resources that you all have invested into like is there like a index of hey here's the project health you know metric stuff here's the governance template stuff where is all that stuff and is it behind Catherine's head by the way to learn more one yes oh got it awesome yeah I'll say there's two main places to actually start leaving aside just like dropping by the channel and asking the stuff is contribute that scene cf.io and you click on the link that says I want to be your M a maintainer and there's a whole bunch of stuff there and there's a project templates directory that has a lot of the templated stuff for things that you need to set up your project the other I'm always thinking about mentorship so the other place you can look is mentoring.cnsf.io and I wanted to mention earlier but missed it on my own notes is that graduated projects incubating projects and sandbox projects are all eligible for mentorship help and so that's that's available to you as well. I found maintainer stuff I think like a couple weeks before I joined the first meeting that I joined but one of the things I've found is like because I've been looking at cnscf.io since like 2016 and it's one of those things where like you know you work on a project for a while or you use a tool and then you just get the way used to what you're doing and then you don't realize that they've released like 30 features you know and oh I could have been doing that better and so I think it's always worth it to me to like just go back to cnscf.io and click around some of the menus because someone's like oh I didn't even know that that existed but yeah it's one of those things where it actually is pretty easy to get to the maintainer information you just but if you don't even know that it's there to look for it then it yeah it's harder. Yeah and we've just reorganized some things to make things a little bit easier to find and Ali's been working on updating a bunch of old questy stuff that we didn't realize was quite as out of date as it was so so that site's actually looking pretty good so if you looked at it even a week or two ago there have been a lot of changes. Any other questions? Yes. So basically I'm sold on the idea to to join and contribute. Yes. I'm not sure if your tag or the previous one that was in this room about sustainability but maybe both. Nice. But yeah it's it's not about me it's about my company how to get the company that is not yet sold on open source that is not an IT company that is an energy company that has a very strong IT department. How to get the company on board when we will not do any products that we can sell as Red Hat for example in the open so the contribution that we will be giving is something that we develop in-house but then probably also something that we will never use in-house. Yeah. Who can I talk to within CNCF on how to sell that in my company? I mean I have a personal recommendation I don't know it's a someone who talked to CNCF so even as someone who I'm in I'm in a DevRel position now my job is to like kind of I'm the person one another career thing is like I did this and then my boss was like why don't you just be the marketing contact and everything else for CNCF but I think like even within that role there's only so much that my boss is like yeah well you can have the time for that right and so when I I was talking about actually about doing a second thing here in the tag and I took that to him and he was like well you know why don't you essentially like take your personal growth training time for that right like so if your job has any kind of like benefit or if they would have you know maybe if they would have given you a thousand dollars a year to take a course or something you can be like guess what I'm going to save you the thousand dollars but I need a couple hours a week or not even a couple hours a week it's a couple hours a month really right and so you might be able to kind of take it from that a side angle like that where it's like maybe part of the training or you know personal development kind of stuff um yeah I don't know that's that's one idea yeah the other thing to do is to actually look at the software that you depend on right because if presumably if you're here your company's at least using cloud native software and particularly actually as an end user stability upstream is even more important to you sometimes than it is for a vendor because if the stuff breaks you have no ability to fix it um and so you know you can sell it as hey I'm working on making sure that all these projects that we depend on are stable and that we don't need to worry about them so I think we reached the end of our time we would really love it if you would provide feedback on the session and tell the CNCF how awesome it was and how much you loved our talk that would be great so if you could oh yeah sorry we have a kiosk downstairs well done only in the project pavilion so if you want to come hang out with us we're there in the second half of the hours so there's a different kiosk there in the morning but we'll be there this afternoon tomorrow afternoon so so come down and chat with us hang out with us ask those questions it'd be great to see you thanks everybody thank you