KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019

For many, the idea of speaking in front of a bunch of strangers can be enough to prevent you from ever responding to a CFP. But don't let it! Speaking at conferences, meetups, or even at your own company is a fantastic way to share you knowledge, meet others, advance your career, and give back. Whether you are on the fence, have decided to take the plunge and submit a CFP, or have already even a few talks, this session is for you. Jenny Burcio and Ashlynn Polini will outline tips and strategies for turning your idea into a winning proposal and ultimately a compelling talk. Drawing on their experience reviewing DockerCon CFPs and prepping speakers (including themselves) for a variety of conferences, they will share how to submit and prepare for your first - or next - conference talk.

Creating/developing a new OSS project is hard as is, but how can you go about successfully sharing your project with the community once you’re ready?

Collectively, this panel has launched/worked on multiple open source projects such as Helm, OpenKruise, CNAB, Docker, Gloo & Service Mesh Interface. From their experience, they've identified elements essential to any open source project launch, no matter how small/big your project is.

In this panel, they'll discuss what should be in an OSS project launch playbook:
• Infrastructure: tools needed to create a public space for your project
• Communications: techniques for setting a tone, creating a brand & spreading the word
• Governance: what you need to create a protected but open space for your community
• Goal: purpose of open sourcing your project, rules of engagement
• Community: what you need to plan to grow, cultivate & engage members

According to research by Open Sourcing Mental Illness, 51% of individuals working in the tech community have been identified with a mental illness. This is disproportionate to the 20% prevalence in the general population. To compound the concern, many working in the tech community are at risk for burnout, a condition that often resembles mental illness. While lots of people in tech struggle with mental health, industry-specific research and advocacy in the community is disproportionately inadequate.

For organizations, awareness and advocacy around employee mental health is crucial, after all, happy employees are more productive and less likely to leave their job. For employees who are struggling, it is important they know that they are not alone and there is help. This talk is focused on reducing the stigma around mental illness and expanding education and awareness into how to help yourself and others in your community. Jennifer will provide mental health background as she reviews the research pertaining to the tech community. Industry-specific burnout will be discussed and strategies for improving one’s experience or helping a friend or colleague will be examined.

You’re new to Kubernetes and interested in contributing, but when you start poking through the community pages, you find a bunch of SIGs and so many meetings. What’s a SIG? Where should you start? Which meetings should you attend? How can you participate?

In this talk, Jorge and Dawn from SIG Contributor Experience will live out a week within the Kubernetes community by walking the audience through what happens in this busy community. As part of the day by day tour of the community, we will cover:
* Getting started and locating meeting calendars
* Finding and participating in SIGs
* Attending meetings and what to expect
* How to get involved
* Where to get help

New contributors, users interested in contributing, engineering managers whose teams are contributing, and anyone interested in learning about new ways to get involved in the Kubernetes community will benefit from attending.

There’s diversity – and then there’s inclusion. The difference between being invited and being a valued participant is vast. The Kubernetes and KubeCon community have made significant strides on both the diversity and inclusion front – but should not be satisfied with progress to date. Join this panel of thought leaders to learn how to turn a diverse community into an inclusive one, hear the challenges of building versus changing a culture, and how to ignite the power of diversity where you contribute.
How does the KubeCon/K8s community continue to lead the way in both diversity AND inclusion? Time to fill the dance floor. It's still too empty.

The digital age has brought us multitudes of advancements - from cost and convenience to connectivity - but those advancements have also left us fundamentally unbalanced, and often, unhealthy. As we advance further into an always-on culture that has developed through over-connectivity, overwork, and constant sensory overload, it has become essential to maintain a healthy balance with both work and technology.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona, the OSMI Handbook did a great job of outlining some tips that attendees can use to maintain their mental health at such large events. We’d like to take that conversation a step further by talking about some techniques that the Cloud Native Community can use in their lives, both personally and professionally. Join us for a diverse panel discussion to share ideas on maintaining a healthy and balanced mental state.

The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud-native community. The CNCF will host a public TOC meeting, inviting the community to discuss various agenda items along with holding an open Q&A for the community with TOC members.

9 months, 3 releases, 3 roles, and countless new faces - here’s a story about how I went from a brand new community member to release lead in less than a year and what I discovered along the way. Over 9 months I dove into the Kubernetes release world and dealt with the challenges of shipping a release, the tough decisions that need to be made, and how to adapt our release plan to stay on target.

The Kubernetes release is at the core of the community. Managing an open source release requires flexibility, transparency, and radical collaboration. As the size of the contributors grows, how does the release process adapt? How are decisions made? How do we react when plans change? How did I quickly move from a shadow to the release lead role? In this talk I plan on addressing these questions and my experience leading the 1.15 release team

The steering committee[1] is tasked with decision-making and oversight with all things related to Kubernetes. This panel discussion is a chance for some navel gazing on where we are today, what got us here and where we are headed to next. This will also be a chance for the newly elected steering committee (October `19 election) to meet face to face with their constituents in the community and wider ecosystem.

[1] https://github.com/kubernetes/steering

In this talk, Lucas and Kasper will share their experiences building a Cloud Native Community in the Nordic countries; Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

Bootstrapping a decentralized community of meetup speakers, enthusiasts, organizers, and companies can be challenging to get right. Key issues to solve on a community-level includes aggregation of data, standardizing common patterns and practices on running meetings, documenting how to start new groups, collaborating with CNCF, setting up communication channels and organizing monthly calls.

Lucas and Kasper will share their stories on organizing Meetups and similar events, scaling this community, and becoming CNCF Ambassadors. They will give practical tips and tricks for the audience to apply to their local community in turn. After this talk you’ll know how to get 10 meetup groups with 4600 members in total to collaborate.