 Hi everyone, thank you for making it to our talk. First of all welcome and in this windy city today we are going to try and unwind the untold stories of the global community. Who are we? I am Rajas, I am a senior member of technical staff at VMware. What that basically means is I look at logs all day and play with YAMLs and this thing called Kubernetes, I don't know if you have heard about it and I'm also a tech leader at technical advisory group Runtime in CNCF and a contributor to Kubernetes. I am Ashutosh with me over here. Hi everyone, I am Ashutosh and I work as a senior software engineer at Elastic. I am also a maintainer of cluster API provider Azure project and yes, like Rajas said, I also play with YAMLs a lot. So let's look at why it is important to talk about the global community. CNCF has helped advance adoption and growth of various cloud techniques and practices. It also hosts and supports a wide variety of open source projects and with a community so big it becomes very important to discuss to enable growth, innovation, collaboration, diversity and inclusivity. And before we go into the untold stories, we would like us to walk through some data from global community. Talking about data, here's a graph of the top countries of the contributing companies and we can see that almost 13% of these companies are from Asia. Moving on, this is a graph that shows contributions from Latin America and as you can see there has been an exponential growth in contributions from Latin America. This is yet another graph that shows contributions from India and it is amazing to see that the contributions has grown six folds from 2016. Here's another graph of all the countries and they are Kubernetes contributions mostly with the KK repository and we can see that China stands as like the second country in terms of contributions. Here's a report from the China's contributor summit that happened earlier this year in September. We almost see this 9% of the total contributors come from China and there's 11.7 contributions happening from China. The report goes to mention that the number may be much more than this given that some of the contributors do use VPNs. I know it's a lot of graphs but there's some more data that we want to show as well. Now that we've seen why it is important to talk about the global community and the presence of global community, it is also important to highlight some of the other trends that we've been noticing. Here's how the number of episodic contributors or the contributors which are not reviewers or maintainers but casual enough to a particular community, the number has been declining year by year. This is something that we should also take into consideration. Here's another graph that talks about how reviewers from across multiple countries and here we've taken say India, China, Brazil and so on and so forth are also showing a declining trend. Well, there is some good news that we have contributors rising across the globe but as we saw, as we saw that there has been a decline in episodic contributors as well as reviewers and this is a concern because these occasional contributors who come to the community and contribute to the project has the potential to become reviewers and maintainers and additionally we have a decline in reviewers too and it is important to remember that these reviewers and maintainers are very crucial for the community and project because they are the ones who are going to mentor newcomers and those newcomers can potentially become reviewers and maintainers leading a path forward for the project. So how do we solve this problem of this decline in reviewers or episodic contributors and we ask this question to someone who happens to be our best friend these days. We obviously asked it to Chad GPT and here's what we asked on how we get more contributors across the world to the Kubernetes community and this is what Chad GPT told us. Chad GPT talks about multilingual documentation, language and local chapters and mentorship programs and goes on to tell us about translation efforts and outreach and scholarships and grants and then also reminds us that this is a continuing process and we should keep at it. This made us look like something like this. So for the rest of the talk, we're going to be talking about the wall. What is this wall? This wall is going to be full of bricks of language barriers and income disparity and time zone issues and so on and so forth and how CNCF or the community and the maintainers come together to put a ladder across this wall. This ladder helps contributors jump across the wall of barriers and then go on to the other side. So one aspect of it is how contributors can, this is analogous to the contributor ladder that we have but this is more in terms of how they can climb up this wall of barriers and go across and also we're going to highlight how maintainers provide a helping hand in uplifting people and taking them across all of the barriers that they face. So let's get started by analyzing this wall brick by brick to start with. This is me at times in meetings when I'm not able to parse a particular phrase being said and honestly that gets me distracted and there are symptoms of imposter syndrome coming in if I'm not able to follow along and also affects what I'm going to speak next. Clearly I'm talking about the language barrier aspect over here. Well, before I talk about language barrier can I get a soft hand who does not belong to a native English speaker? Okay, I myself do not belong to a native English speaking community and we should be aware that in this globe most people are non-native English speaker and at times it becomes very challenging to go in a meeting and comprehend what people said it. So I personally kind of prefer written communication but meetings are bound to happen and it is important. So we'll also touch upon cultural barrier in the next slides but one of the ways I try to tackle this problem of language barrier was to speak up on the meeting, maybe try to speak up slow or ask the other person to repeat themselves if I couldn't make sense of what happened in that meeting. And if I felt that I didn't talk my mind through I take time to go to the Slack and you know write my message and ask questions again and again. And I would like to give a huge shout out to this talk that happened in Cube Day Japan that just upon this topic of language barrier and we need to talk more about this kind of challenges in the community. Very forward, first before we get started on what's there on the screen a huge shout out to Ann Bakom who's been doing a lot of research in terms of retaining episodic contributors across multiple open source communities. So here's a snapshot from this research people called as managing episodic volunteers in floss communities where they talk about how cultural aspects and in this particular case how Japanese contributors felt that the GNU programmers are superior than them and that made them not talk up front or speak up up front. Personally I've felt this in local communities too here in India back in India, I mean Chicago and I forgot about that, where symptoms of imposter syndrome crop in when something like this goes on. There is also another great blog post on the factors that counter into retention of episodic contributors. So here we see the main weightage is given to the commitment from community but there is also significant weightage by social norms. There's another blog research paper on why do episodic volunteers stay in floss communities where they touch base upon the social norms aspect on how they play a huge role or maybe a significant role in an episodic contributor retaining or coming back to an open source community and grow in that open source community. So while we talk about how the community helps and all of that stuff we should also be cognizant about the social aspect or across the geographical boundaries that one has to go through while also contributing. Let me get started with this pop culture references imposter syndrome and written in English. I have found myself hard to parse sentences either in meeting or when it's on written slack you know what this really mean. This is some pop culture reference that's going on and trust me even you know I did some Google I couldn't figure out what's going on and I had to like you know paying my friend say do you know what this phrase means or what this line means. And this becomes really hard when you're trying to communicate in the community. Also when all of these things goes on and a lot of discussions are going on and you are kind of joned out and you're not able to make sense of what's going around sometimes you feel like maybe I don't know anything you know and you may get into this imposter syndrome and feel low and you know have an inferior complexity. And one of the reasons one of the solutions that I just touched upon in the previous slide was like spoken versus written English like many of us out there may not be comfortable in speaking English as much as in writing English right. So next slide. I wanted to give a shout out to community in there where a lot of efforts are being carried out for being more inclusive. This snippet is from you know Nikita where a lot of folks out there were trying to help write projects from different contributors across different reasons and we wanted to collect some data and we figured that you know not all contributors might be comfortable in coming to a June meeting and talk to their points. So they really thought through this and made a Google document to put their feedback sorry Google form to put their feedback in the Google form. So I really appreciate folks in the community doing this kind of inclusive efforts. One of the cultural aspects I wanted to touch upon especially back in India I'm not sure if it happens in other parts of the world it's like new contributors coming out there and referring you by certain maps. So I just wanted to touch upon this so you get banned by this if you refer certain maps. So let us take a look at how community has been helping in removing this language barrier. As you can see on the screen there has been a lot of efforts put out to do localization of communities document. For example you can see in Portuguese, Hindi, Brazilian and a lot of outstanding contributors putting effort there and if you look at the Kubernetes document you can see a list of other non-English languages that are out there. So this is pretty good sign. Let us talk about community forums. This is a forum where contributors go and discuss and you can see there are languages in Ukrainian, Chinese, Italian and all other languages where people are trying to communicate in their native languages and I will not be surprised to see that more languages appear in future. To sum it up while there have been language barriers but there has also been effort from the community in terms of localization, in terms of pushing for more spoken verses written or more in terms of various forms of communications. What also stands out is that local mentorship and local leadership also helps in terms of mentoring people around them. So here is a nice quote from Si and Akihito from Cube Day Japan wherein they talked about how you do not have to worry about whether your English was good or not. The community at the end of the day is kind enough to accommodate for everyone. So this is a quote that stayed with us and we wanted to highlight that. A huge shout out to Victor and Rael for having this talk in Valencia last year which talks about the language barriers and how community helps does certain amount of efforts to cross them or bridge them and how contributors then contribute back to the community by removing all of these language barriers. So I wanted to give a shout out to that as well. Moving on. This is me when I have to attend a late night meeting and I feel really sleepy. I am sure people working across the time zone may be going through this similar issue as well and we just wanted to touch base upon how time zone is also a very important factor to consider in while we work in a global community. Let us talk about time zones. Well, this is a very hard problem to deal with. So people say that DNS and naming things are hard. I think we can add this to the list and it is very it's very hard to you know work across time zones and given that you can have language barrier it can elevate the problem. And you know if you have meetings at VRs so your work-life balance goes for a toss. And you know when you with all of this going on and when you are trying to be in the community do some contribution you know try to follow discussion it becomes very hard to deal with all of this and it can lead to burnout. Everyone gets it. I have jotted couple of points on you know how I personally you know try to fix this time zone issues. I don't have a complete full-frope solution. I don't think anybody has but you know one of the things that helps really well is you know falling back to async communication and it really takes time when I was starting to in the community you know it was really hard to understand the power of async communication. This is something you know that comes up with time when you go there start to talk to people and contribute. So this is this is one thing that has helped me a lot and you know even from communicating in Slack you can go little beyond commenting on issues and PRs you know so over communication is key at times. And I just wanted to give a youth shout out to Divya who is one of amazing contributors from India and she has been pushing a lot for async communication and you know she has been also pushing a lot for regional meetings for example APAC meetings and this helps a lot you know when local contributors come together in a regional time zone mind works well. Well these days internet also gives you a feeling of power and I just wanted to touch upon this because a lot of people may not be aware that internet is still an issue in a lot of parts in the world right. Even if you have internet it can be flaky. So we don't know you know how we can do to completely solve this problem but one of the things that we wanted to touch upon was we can be aware that this kind of problem exists and the least we can do is to be kind and be empathetic to the contributors and people across the globe. So take time to be kind. Moving on let's have a quick show of hands of how many people over here have been funded by the employers or through a scholarship to attend KubeCon plus Cowboy DevCon. That's almost the entire room over here. We wanted to give a huge shout out to all of the employers who fund their employees to talk or attend conferences. You've not been talking a lot about this but we wanted to start this conversation around income disparity by first giving a shout out to employers and then move because not a lot of people may be cognizant of the fact that a lot of people have to shell in a lot of funds to just to travel across seven continents and attend a global conference like this. Here's some research by Ricardo for putting all of these data out which shows how someone from India may have spent 25% of the annual income just to attend KubeCon debt or someone from Brazil must have spent in an order of 13% or so while someone from maybe North America may have spent less than 2% and this is across a lot of conferences. The point we're trying to make over here is when we talk about a global community there will be income disparity and there will be issues in terms of how people get to attend conferences so on and so forth. The help that has been given over here is through scholarships. We had a shout out earlier in the day in the keynotes in the closing session to Dan called the scholarship and all the sponsors that support this scholarship. So there's scholarship coming in from CNCF, it's need based students and so forth. There's also speaker travel funds so people whose talks have been accepted but need travel funds CNCF also supports them and then there's also sponsorship by company, the employer that we've already talked about. Here are some stats on 2022 annual report which talks about 749 diversity applicants who funded and 726 need based applicants who funded for KubeCon plus CloudNativeCon. And then there has been an increasing number of KCDs and local chapters in terms of meetups and conferences happening across the world. There has been an 85% rise from 2021, there have been presentations in multiple languages happening so the point we're trying to make over here is while it may be difficult for a lot of people, even with all of the avenues of scholarships and sponsorships in place, a lot of people may still not be able to make it. So for them KCDs and all of these regional events at cube days and meetups and conferences help speaking about some more stats, here's another stats from CNCF annual report from 2022 which talks about how many chapters have been going on, how many events have been happening and the number of attendees have also been increasing. Here are some pictures that we collated from KCD, Bangalore that happened earlier this year and there was a Q-Day Japan and there was Contributor Summit in China and so on and so forth. And taking this to the next level, there have been a bunch of other events announced by CNCF for 2024, there's a Q-Con in India going to happen in 2024. Next month in December, there's Q-Day India happening, then there's Q-Day Singapore lighting up, there's Q-Day Columbia happening in 2024. So we just wanted to show up how there has been effort going on from CNCF as well to address this point and then all of these, some of these concerns at least are being heard. Let's move on to visas now. Well, can you move on to the next slide? This is just a meme for us. So now you have your CFP accepted, you may get awarded a scholarship or you might have also got your speaker travel fund or you may even got sponsored by your employer. But the next thing that hits you is visa. I mean a lot of people around the globe have this issue where now you have done all of this work and you have to handle the logistics of visa paperwork and you need to prepare for your talks or prepare for your community commitments and also do visa paperwork. And after all of this, your visa gets denied. You don't want to win that spot, right? So I just wanted to again give a shout out to people in the community where even on issues like this, people come together and help each other. The youths are out of force who help other contributors to help navigate visa logistics and tell them how this works and how things can be done in terms of paperwork and stuff. So that really helps. Thanks folks for doing this. Moving on. This is not, this has no relevance to the number of people in this room by any chance. We wanted to talk about how a room can look like this and if someone wants to enter a room that looks like this, it may be really difficult for them. It really helps if the room looks like this. The point that we are trying to make over here is when someone tries to enter a room, if they feel or if they find someone that's looking like them or similar to them in any respect, that gives them the psychological safety, that gives them the motivation and the inspiration to be comfortable in that room as well as grow in that room, talk in that room, be vocal in that room, put their questions out, put their suggestions out, speak up. So representation really helps in terms of how we can grow the community. Moving on, this is some, you can, talking about QCon plus Cloud NativeCon, it can look overwhelming or intimidating for some people because it's huge. 10,000 plus attendees going on. So if you're a first-time attendee or if you don't have a lot of networking happening, you can end up feeling intimidated and overwhelmed. It helps to have a buddy with you in a conference. It helps if you can network with the community. If there is a seasoned contributor next to you, introducing you to other members and it goes an extra mile, if you just have some people that you're comfortable with, you know, to navigate around the conference. So having a buddy is very important. There has been a lot of effort in the community to have sessions like Know Before You Go. There have been group peer mentoring sessions happening at KubeCon this year. All of these are helping one feel much more comfortable in such a global conference. Talking about peer group mentoring sessions. Remember the wall and the ladder and the contributors and all of these analogies we talked about a while ago. Let's focus on the helping hand aspect over here. There are a lot of avenues in terms of how mentorship helps. At a CNCF level, there's Google Summer of Code that affects mentorship programs going on, there's Season of Dogs, Outreach, so on and so forth. But even at the community level, there are multiple mentorship programs going on. Say for example, the Release Team Shadow program that happens in Kubernetes community, which helps a lot of contributors get into the community, be part of the Release Team as shadows and then eventually grow in the community, maybe in the Release Team or in any other area. I know a lot of contributors who have started with the Release Team and then grown to much more in leadership roles, particularly across the community. A huge shout out to Priyanka for being the 129 Release Lead and a huge shout out to the rest of the folks who have been elected as the Release Lead Shadow for the 129 Release, extending this to Contribacks. Yeah, there has been mentoring program going on, not only in Sig Release but also in Sig Contribacks and you can see the screenshots of how people are trying to put efforts to mentor more and more people in these areas too. I wanted to give a huge shout out to these people, Madhav, Naborun, Priyanka, Kastlin, Meha, Micky, Rodolfo, Angelos, if you are there, please give a clap for them. Thanks for pulling up a lot of work in the community. Yeah, specifically, Madhav for being the Contribacks TL, Priyanka also being the Contribacks TL, Naborun over here for being the chair along with Kastlin, also Naborun for leading the way, particularly in APAC from the Release Team side of things and then Meha, Micky, Rodolfo, Angelos for being elected as the Release Lead Shadows this year. From some shout outs to a lot more shout outs. We wanted to talk about a few set of people in the community specifically and spend some time on there. So to start with, we wanted to highlight Pako, who is a steering committee member now, a Cubanea maintainer, a signatory viewer and one of the top contributors from China. So when we asked Pako on what all were the challenges that he faced and how was his journey in the community, here are some snippets on what Pako had to say on how he started with fixing flaking tests in CI groups and things like that and how people in the community, Sergey helped him over here. When he wanted to grow into another role of like developing a feature and then putting it from alpha to GA, how Jordan helped him over here and Pako goes on to say how the community is so full of kindness and comes together to help everyone, there's a space for everyone. So we really wanted to highlight Pako's story and he also sent us the snapshot of the first signored meeting that he attended from 2021 wherein and the issue that he picked and how he got started and signored. So use round of applause for Pako. So we wanted to talk about one more outstanding contributor, Carol Valencia. Carol is here. She's a CNCF ambassador and organizer of KCD Brazil and have been part of several Kubernetes release teams. You know, it's very hard to be even on one release team and do the job. So thank you Carol for putting a lot of work out there. And you can see what Carol has to say on the screen. And Carol was mentioning like how it becomes really overwhelming to go initially navigate the project and the area and how, you know, she tried to talk to the maintainers and make networking to deal with this problem. And Carol will work in the local community, especially in Brazil. It's very outstanding. So thank you for pulling up this amazing work and inspiring a lot other in the local community. Let's move on to one more outstanding contributor, Shubhashmita. She's an R&D engineer at Sevo and she has been part of 1.26 Kubernetes release team, Sado. And like every other contributor, she also faced a storage of challenges and she speaks in her own word that, you know, these challenges help her to, you know, test her abilities, you know, and come even more stronger and contribute to the community. And she mentions how community has been so kind and helpful in navigating all of those. I wanted to highlight on one important contribution of Shubhashmita that also deals with one of the challenges that I will talk in some time now. So this was one of the blogs that Shubhashmita wrote and it's about automating and make update using a Kubernetes CI bot and Seaco authored this blog with DIMMS. And one of the challenges that we contributors face is like having not so powerful machine and it can become really hard to, you know, run make update or make verify commands for Kubernetes and they put a really good solution on putting a CI that can do the make verify and make update for your behalf. So thank you for doing this amazing job. We also have to give a shout out to DIMMS, obviously, for all that DIMMS does for the community. Most of the cloud native contributors have a DIMMS story to tell and clearly do I, even when I was getting started contributing to Kubernetes, DIMMS helped me, gave me actionable advice on how to get started, how to grow in the community and how, how basically advice that I still use till day. So from one amazing person to another amazing person, we had to give a shout out to Nikita. Nikita is over here. Thank you, Nikita for all that you do. Nikita is an embodiment of how one can uplift the community around them. We are going to introduce one more term right now to, so next time, if you have to appreciate another person in the community for an outstanding effort in a particular project or in the community that they have done, and if you're running out of objectives, just tell them that they pulled off a Nikita. So from publishing bot maintainers to yet another publishing bot maintainer that we have over here, oh, by the way, Nikita's keynote is happening tomorrow. It's united in the cloud where inclusion wins around the world. There are a lot of people going to be there on stage tomorrow. Don't miss this. I'm very much excited to attend this keynote. So now moving from some maintainers of publishing bot to another maintainer of publishing bot, Akhil is over here. I have known Akhil from earlier times of Open EBS, which was a project, Open Source project we worked together on. And right now he is a senior member of Technical Stop at VMware. Let us dive into the story of Akhil. And Akhil says that when he started in the community, again, like everyone else, you know, it's very easy to get lost with a lot of information and how community helped provide mentorship to Akhil and, you know, pull up some amazing work. One of the couple of works done by Akhil I wanted to mention is one done in the publishing bot where he refactored it so that other projects, for example, container D can use it. And Akhil also faced a longstanding critical issue in container D, which I was personally hit where users were not able to push, you know, images. And here is Akhil now, maintainer of, you know, Kubernetes Publishing Bot and he is actively contributing to container D and CNCF tag runtime. So thank you, Akhil, for doing this amazing work and inspiring a lot of us, even though facing a lot of challenges and working in a not-so-friendly time zone. So a huge round of applause for Akhil. Let's move on to one other outstanding contributor, Ricardo. He's here. You know, he's from Brazil and he's a staff engineer at VMware and he's a maintainer of Indus and GenX and he created a project known as KubePark. And if you don't know what KubePark, feel free to check it out on GitHub. It's a pre-upgrade checker. It's a very cool project. Thank you, Ricardo, for creating that project. And Ricardo says that how he has been free-blissed to, you know, get to school and, you know, learn English. And one of the things I like about Ricardo is that not only he is contributing to the community individually, but the efforts that he puts on to the local community and the voice that he brings for people back home in Brazil, right? And his goal is to, that regardless of language and financial limitations, he wants to, he wants the contributors to come up in the community, contribute and grow into open source roles and professional ladder. Thank you, Ricardo. This means a lot for people out there. And with this, we come to the end of the list talk. So thank you very much. Registrar, you want to add anything? Yeah. Thank you, everyone, for listening to us. So for everyone who's there in the room and people are going to watch this recording later on, we hope that some of the challenges that you may face or some of the barriers that you have either faced in the community or currently facing, you're going to relate to some of these at least. And this inspires you to grow in the community. And if you have not started to start in the community, and this helps you in your journey, that is one hope that we have. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you. If you have any feedback, feel free to post this feedback on. Thank you. This is not a technical session, so I don't expect questions. But if anyone has questions, please go ahead. Or if anyone has comments, please go ahead. Thank you for everything that you do in the community, Ricardo.