A Look Back and What's in Store for Kubernetes Contributor Summits

Authors: Paris Pittman (Google), Jonas Rosland (VMware)

As our contributing community grows in great numbers, with more than 16,000 contributors this year across 150+ GitHub repositories, it’s important to provide face to face connections for our large distributed teams to have opportunities for collaboration and learning. In Contributor Experience, our methodology with planning events is a lot like our documentation; we build from personas -- interests, skills, and motivators to name a few. This way we ensure there is valuable content and learning for everyone.

We build the contributor summits around you:

• New Contributor
• Current Contributor
  • docs
  • code
  • community management
• Subproject OWNERs - aka maintainers in other OSS circles.
• Special Interest Group (SIG) / Working Group (WG) Chair or Tech Lead
• Active Contributors
• Casual Contributors

These personas combined with ample feedback from previous events, produce the altogether experience that welcomed over 600 contributors in Copenhagen (May), Shanghai(November), and Seattle(December) in 2018. Seattle's event drew over 300+ contributors, equal to Shanghai and Copenhagen combined, for the 6th contributor event in Kubernetes history. In true Kubernetes fashion, we expect another record breaking year of attendance. We've pre-ordered 900+ contributor patches, a tradition, and we are looking forward to giving them to you!

With that said…

Save the Dates:
Barcelona: May 19th (evening) and 20th (all day)
Shanghai: June 24th (all day)
San Diego: November 18th, 19th, and activities in KubeCon/CloudNativeCon week

In an effort of continual improvement, here's what to expect from us this year:

• Large new contributor workshops and contributor socials at all three events expected to break previous attendance records
• A multiple track event in San Diego for all contributor types including workshops, birds of a feather, lightning talks and more
• Addition of a “201” / “Intermediate” edition of the new contributor workshop in San Diego
• An event website!
• Follow along with updates: kubernetes-dev@googlegroups.com is our main communication hub as always; however, we will also blog here, our Thursday Kubernetes Community Meeting, twitter, SIG meetings, event site, discuss.kubernetes.io, and #contributor-summit on Slack.
• Opportunities to get involved: We still have 2019 roles available! Reach out to Contributor Experience via community@kubernetes.io, stop by a Wednesday SIG update meeting, or catch us on Slack (#sig-contribex).

Thanks!

Our 2018 crew 🥁
Jorge Castro, Paris Pittman, Bob Killen, Jeff Sica, Megan Lehn, Guinevere Saenger, Josh Berkus, Noah Abrahams, Yang Li, Xiangpeng Zhao, Puja Abbassi, Lindsey Tulloch, Zach Corleissen, Tim Pepper, Ihor Dvoretskyi, Nancy Mohamed, Chris Short, Mario Loria, Jason DeTiberus, Sahdev Zala, Mithra Raja

And an introduction to our 2019 crew (a thanks in advance ;) )…
Jonas Rosland, Josh Berkus, Paris Pittman, Jorge Castro, Bob Killen, Deb Giles, Guinevere Saenger, Noah Abrahams, Yang Li, Xiangpeng Zhao, Puja Abbassi, Rui Chen, Tim Pepper, Ihor Dvoretskyi, Dawn Foster

Relive Seattle Contributor Summit

📈 80% growth rate since the Austin 2017 December event

📜 Event waiting list: 103

🎓 76 contributors were on-boarded through the New Contributor Workshop

🎉 92% of the current contributors RSVPs attended and of those:

👩🏻‍🚒 25% were Special Interest Group or Working Group Chairs or Tech Leads

🗳 70% were eligible to vote in the last steering committee election - more than 50 contributions in 2018

📹 20+ Sessions

👀 Most watched to date: Technical Vision, Security, API Code Base Tour

🌟 Top 3 according to survey: Live API Code Review, Deflaking Unconference, Technical Vision

🎱 🎳 160 attendees for the social at Garage on Sunday night where we sunk eight balls and recorded strikes (out in some cases)

🏆 Special recognition: SIG Storage, @dims, and @jordan

📸 Pictures (special thanks to rdodev)

“I love Contrib Summit! The intros and deep dives during KubeCon were a great extension of Contrib Summit. Y'all did an excellent job in the morning to level set expectations and prime everyone.” -- julianv
“great work! really useful and fun!” - coffeepac

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