Kubernetes SIG Contributor Experience Deep Dive

The Kubernetes Contributor Experience Special Interest Group (SIG) is tasked with developing and sustaining a healthy contributor community. Things like feature velocity, community scaling, mentoring, pull request latency, and more all fall within scope of the SIG. In this talk, we will provide an introduction to SIG Contributor Experience, its role within the project, and dive into the various subprojects that support its mission. Additionally, we will provide a general community update and go over how you can get involved.

Transcript

1. Welcome to
   SIG Contributor Experience
   

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2. Who are we?
   Alison Dowdney
   @alisondy
   Nikhita Raghunath
   @nikhita
   Christoph Blecker
   @cblecker
   Bob Killen
   @mrbobbytables
   

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3. What is the Kubernetes Community
   #2 OSS project by developer activity*
   #3 project by Pull Requests*
   Source: devstats
   Community Stats (March 2021)
   Contributors 56,000+
   Org Members 1,275~
   Repos 320~
   Pull Requests 195,000+
   Slack 120,000+
   * As of 2021-01-11 - Ref: CNCF Velocity Report
   

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4. Confidential │ ©2020 VMware, Inc.
   

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5. What we do
   “The Contributor Experience Special Interest Group (SIG) is responsible for
   improving the experience of those who upstream contribute to the Kubernetes
   project. We do this by creating, and maintaining programs and processes that
   promote community health and reduce project friction, while retiring those
   programs and processes that don't. Being conscientious of our contributor base is
   critical to scaling the project, growing the ecosystem, and helping the project
   succeed.”
   - SIG Contributor Experience Charter
   

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6. First things first
   ● Community Group List:
   https://k8s.dev/groups
   ● Community Meeting List:
   https://k8s.dev/calendar
   

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7. Teams
   ● Events
   ● Contributor Marketing
   ● GitHub Admins
   ● Stream Team
   ● Moderators
   ● “Community Managers”
   

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8. How we do it...subprojects
   ● Community - Owns and manages overall community repo, including community group
   documentation and operations.
   ● Community Management - Manages operations and policy for upstream community group
   communication platforms.
   ● Contributor Documentation - Writes and maintains documentation around contributing to
   Kubernetes, including the Contributor's Guide, Developer's Guide, and contributor website.
   ● Devstats - Maintains and updates https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io, including taking requests for new
   charts.
   https://git.k8s.io/community/sig-contributor-experience#subprojects
   

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9. How we do it...subprojects
   ● Events - Creates and runs contributor-focused events, such as the Contributor Summit. Event
   Teams are part of this subproject.
   ● GitHub Management - Manages and controls Github permissions, repos, and groups, including
   Org Membership.
   ● K8s.io - Creates and maintains shortcuts and automation apps running in the k8s.io domain.
   ● Mentoring - Oversees and develops programs for helping contributors ascend the contributor
   ladder, including the New Contributor Workshops, Meet Our Contributors, and other programs.
   ● Slack Infra - Creates and maintains tools and automation for Kubernetes Slack.
   https://git.k8s.io/community/sig-contributor-experience#subprojects
   

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10. Community Management
    ● Mailing Lists and Calendars
    ○ All community groups have public meetings with notes
    ○ Join the list of the thing you’re interested in
    ● YouTube
    ○ Check out youtube.com/kubernetescommunity
    

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11. Community Management
    ● Community Repo
    ○ OWNERs of github.com/kubernetes/community
    ○ “Meta of the meta” - governance documentation, election procedures, values.md, anything
    steering wants us to oversee or janitorialize.
    ● Zoom
    ○ TLDR: Keep your clients up to date
    ● discuss.k8s.io
    ○ Community forum with related k8s topics
    ● Moderators
    ○ Always looking for experienced mods.
    

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12. ● Broken out as its own subproject!
    ● Manage the Kubernetes Contributor Twitter - @k8sContributors
    ● Focused on Contributor focused content and stories
    ● KubeCon NA 2019 Talk on the Marketing Team: Building Better Communication for
    Kubernetes Contributors with Marketing
    Contributor Comms (marketing)
    

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13. Contributors Documentation
    ● Contributor Guide
    ● Developer Guide
    ○ Undergoing audit and update
    ● Contributor Site
    ○ Publish contributor guide, community
    calendar, release information and more
    

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14. DevStats
    ● Toolset to visualize GitHub archives
    (GitHub events) using Grafana
    dashboards
    ● Dashboards have been re-evaluated
    to support the needs of the
    community groups.
    

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15. Events
    Shifted to virtual events focused on
    community building and fun
    2020 Community Celebration
    

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16. GitHub Management
    ● Manages and controls Github permissions, repos, and groups, including Org
    Membership.
    ● Kubernetes-incubator Org retired
    ● Working on master -> main default branch rename
    ○ k8s.dev/rename - Guide for subproject owners to migrate their repos
    

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17. Mentoring Prereq - The ladder
    Subproject
    Owner
    - Set priorities and approve proposals for subproject
    - Responsibility and leadership for entire repository/directory
    Approver - Approve contributions for acceptance
    - Highly experienced reviewer and contributor in subproject
    Reviewer - History of reviewing; reviews frequently
    - Authorship in subproject
    Member - Active contributor to the project
    - Sponsored by two Reviewers
    Non-member Contributors
    

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18. Mentoring
    ● Programs / Initiatives:
    ○ Meet our Contributors - AMA with current contributors
    ○ Group Mentoring Cohorts - Semi-structured group mentoring initiative with a small group of
    people
    ○ Shadow Programs (Building Teams) - Scalable apprenticeship program
    ○ Google Summer of Code (GSoC) - Internship program
    ○ Outreachy Internships - Internship Program
    ○ New Contributor Workshop - more on this in a bit
    ESSENTIAL TO OVERALL PROJECT HEALTH
    

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19. Mentoring - New Contributor Workshop
    ● Formerly an all day workshop hosted as a
    part of the Contributor Summits
    ● Being reworked to be piecemeal and targeted
    towards online only
    ● Can be found in the future on k8s.dev
    

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20. Slack infra
    ● Slack tooling has enabled us to manage a 120k user
    Slack
    ● K8s Moderator bot
    ● Announcebot - send messages to any number of
    channels
    ●
    

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21. How you can Contribute
    

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23. Getting involved...the SIG Meeting
    ● Every SIG/WG/UG has regularly
    scheduled meetings
    ● All meetings are uploaded to the
    Kubernetes Community YouTube
    Channel
    ● SIG ContribEx Mailing List
    ...sometimes we have random hat days too!
    

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24. Tips on your first SIG Meeting
    ● Find a buddy
    ● Volunteer to take notes
    ● Attend regularly
    ● Small, dependable contributions > volunteering for the world
    ● SIGs should have a list of “good first issues” for you to chew on,
    if they don’t then … start with issue triaging
    

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25. There are non-code related paths available
    

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26. Where to find us
    ● Chairs
    ○ @mrbobbytables
    ○ @alisondy
    ● Technical Leads
    ○ @cblecker
    ○ @nikhita
    ● Home page: README link
    ● Slack channel: https://kubernetes.slack.com/messages/sig-contribex
    ● List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/kubernetes-sig-contribex
    

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27. Thank you!
    

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