 All right, welcome to my lightning talk. I'm Shwai Lamba. I'm a contributor and meshmate at Layer 5. And the topic of my lightning talk is a meshmate, a new way of expanding open source committee mentorship. So a lot of us have seen these kind of issues, right? That if you have thought about ever contributing to the scenes here, which is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, you might have come across this particular diagram which shows the entire landscape or the ecosystem for the CNCF. And it can be really difficult for someone who is as a beginner to go through it. And sometimes even when I actually saw this landscape, my mind was completely blown because of the sheer number of projects that are there, like having landscape from databases to all the way working with Kubernetes. So of course, CNCF is just one of those open source projects that are out there. But of course, these kind of issues with respect to the fear that someone might have when it actually comes to contributing to open source, especially someone who is a beginner, they lie abundantly across the vast spectrum of the different open source projects that today exist amongst us. So some of the common struggles that a beginner, especially who is just getting started in an open source journey, often feels really insecure or they feel really shy to ask questions to the maintainers or to the audience of that particular open source project that they want to contribute to because they feel very uncomfortable in asking the questions. And sometimes they can be very intimidated by the large code bases that might be there. They might actually get imposter syndrome from seeing a lot of the other active contributors. And sometimes, of course, they might get confused. Where should they actually contribute to? Because they don't have that appropriate knowledge about the ecosystem, especially if you're looking at a large ecosystem like, let's say, the cloud native, the CNCF ecosystem. So in order to overcome some of these struggles that beginners usually face, especially students or folks who are early into their tech journey, that's where the Layer 5 community, which is a community mainly for service meshes. So it's part of the CNCF, a number of different projects that have been born and brought up by the Layer 5 community currently are incubated in the CNCF, which is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. So we came up with this program known as the MeshMates program. And the main idea behind this MeshMates program is to empower these students or these newcomers into technology who have just ventured or have stepped into the cloud native space to feel secure and to actually feel welcomed into these communities. So what MeshMates are, MeshMates are some of these regular and some of the core members of the Layer 5 community who have had the experience of actually being contributing to some of the projects. And they have actually stayed in the community for long and they have been actively helping others in the community. So what the MeshMates do is that they sort of pair up with these newcomers who are coming in the first time for the first time in the Layer 5 community and they provide them one-to-one mentorship. And they provide this personalized mentorship to these students or to these newcomers to sort of help them explore the vast CNCF landscape. And that's not just limited to actually the CNCF landscape if a newcomer has no idea about open source in general, let's say, with respect to Git GitHub. So they will actually provide them that one-to-one mentorship with respect to Git GitHub, with respect to the CNCF landscape, with respect to all the projects that are actually there inside the Layer 5 and outside the Layer 5 as well. And this will sort of help make the students or the newcomers feel much more welcomed because generally that's one of the biggest problems that we see that they are not just very willing to open up because they are a little insecure or they are feeling scared to ask questions. But by providing this one-to-one mentorship they feel a lot more welcomed. And essentially that's what the major objective of this program is to make open source representation and whosoever is joining irrespective of their status, they feel welcomed into this open source program. So in order to actually become a meshmate, you can actually join the weekly newcomer's meetings that takes place on every Thursday. And you can also follow the community handbook that sort of covers how you can actually get started by becoming a part of the Layer 5 community. And you can also get an overview of all the different open source projects that are actually there right now. And then you sort of are paired with this meshmate to provide you the one-to-one mentorship. And again, the idea is that you are guided not only in terms of the projects themselves but also the meshmates, they help you shape your career by understanding what are your interests and then sort of helping you make your first ever pull request and first-ever open source contribution so that you become more confident and more competent in actually being able to make open source contribution especially in the cloud native landscape. And of course, the more you contribute then you can jump on the contribution ladder. And that's why the Layer 5 community is actually one of the most well sought after community especially for students and for early beginners. There are more than 700 plus contributors right now across various projects and there are maintainers from multiple countries, companies that are part of this ecosystem. And that actually also super proud to share that basically under the Linus Foundation mentorship that is the LFX Mentorship Program which is a program meant for college students to take part in various open source projects. The Layer 5 projects including the Mesh Street project was actually rated the number one project. And that's mainly again because of the driving factor that each and every member who joins respective of their experience are always welcomed with open hands to actually come and join the community and they are given this one-to-one post-sites mentorship. Now of course, this you might ask, like of course for larger organizations which have like let's say tens of thousands of members is being able to provide one to one mentorship is it feasible? So of course it might not be feasible but the general idea that I want to represent through this program is that open source really is open for everyone, right? Generally we speak about diversity in open source or diversity in technology but diversity and inclusivity are two different things, right? And we have to ensure that each and every person who joins an open source community feels secure and they feel inclusive of the community and inclusiveness also comes from the fact that they are able to truly understand the core values of the open source organization and also of course with respect to the code as well. So that's why in order to make others feel inclusive we can actually create programs like this MeshMate program to make everyone feel welcomed and of course MeshMate is just one of these programs that showcases that if you provide value to the community and if you feel, if you make your newcomers feel welcomed in the program then they are there, they're going to be there for the long run and they're going to be happy and that's one of the greatest ways to measure the success of an open source community and of course in communities in general. But yeah, with that in mind, thank you so much for attending this lightning talk. If you want to connect with me you can connect with me on my Twitter at there at HowDevelop and if you want to start your cloud native journey you can join the layer five community by going to layer5.io slash community. Thank you so much.