SIG Contributor Experience: Guiding C... Nabarun Pal, Priyanka Saggu, Arpit Agrawal & Mario Fahlandt

This talk focuses on the efforts of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group (SIG) within the Kubernetes community to enhance participation and manage contributions effectively. The speakers discuss the importance of the Kubernetes code of conduct, the growing number of contributors, and the challenges faced in maintaining the project, particularly with the decline in active maintainers. They highlight tools and initiatives like the 'Last Week in Kubernetes Development' (LWKD) newsletter, which aims to keep contributors informed about project updates and events. The session also covers the management of GitHub repositories, the implementation of security policies around AI tools, and mentorship opportunities for new contributors. Overall, the talk emphasizes the need for community engagement and the role of various initiatives in sustaining the Kubernetes ecosystem.

have with me on my stage uh on my stage sorry uh on the stage uh uh fellow co-chairs and tech leads for sick contributor experience. So I have Priyanka. >> Um okay it's working. Hi everyone, my name is Priyanka. I'm one of the technical leads for Contraix >> and Nabarun. >> Hi Nabarun. I am one of the other chairs of S contrax >> and uh we don't

have a yet leadership person but we have arit with us who will that a lot of stuff inside of contra and we thought to give also like a little a stage to people who are actually doing work and not only sitting in meetings supposedly doing stuff. So >> uh so >> yeah so hey everyone I am Arpit uh as of now I am currently managing uh YouTube

and other social media of like Kubernetes and like uh as much as I might get I try to contribute to Kubernetes. So yeah. >> Yeah. And hi I'm Mario. I'm a coach here as well for the contributor experience and doing some other stuff. Uh first and foremost that's always basically something that if you have attended a Kubernetes meeting any Kubernetes Kubernetes meeting uh in the past it

basically starts with the code of conduct. So we really take uh look for people to uh apply by the code of conduct which basically is TLDDR be nice and excellent to your fellow speakers, maintainers, attendees. um uh respect them and treat them in a nice and respectful way. This is basically also uh somewhat looked over by our sick contrax a little bit, but this is also basically

applying to any maintainer track that you are potentially going to watch in the next three days. Three days. Um >> also like every session and around the conference as well. >> Exactly. And uh who are we? So we are some of those people. Um this was actually taken on Sunday uh when the maintainer summit happened. And the maintainer summit is basically uh when all of us maintainers

or as many maintainers as possible come together for one day of conference before CubeCon to exchange ideas to talk about uh topics that are re that are relevant to the projects. And uh yeah, this happened two days ago and it was really really great because we had over 400 maintainers gathering to talk about ideas. And uh who are maintainers? Maintainers are basically uh considered people who are

org members in Kubernetes or part of the uh Kubernetes project. And we currently have we are close to have over 100,000 people contributing to Kubernetes. We have over 4.5 million contributions. And then you see our small problem. We have 8,900 people who reviewed stuff. And uh as you can see also with the all of the AI things that are happening. This is a hard number to review

all of the pull requests that come in. So uh that's what we are looking for like getting more maintainers to then that we can move them to be reviewers to actually review the stuff that is generated by cloud. So and these are the numbers from March. So this is pretty pretty new and also we are one of the biggest projects or we are that biggest project inside

of the CNCF and we are one of the biggest projects inside of also of the Linux Foundation and um we are still looking for people to help us maintain Kubernetes and what we need to say is that we have a declining number of contributors. So the orc is not growing anymore. So we are we we lose maintainers every year. So the orc is getting smaller and um

what we are doing at contrabex we are basically the ones that are talking about uh GitHub management we do as you heard social media we do uh YouTube we do all of the housekeeping of the Kubernetes project so we help people to find their way around we uh have information meetings about how to contribute to Kubernetes uh which we will talk later about. We will also do

uh things on how to govern the project a little bit like supporting steering with uh AI guidelines and stuff like this. So we are the good soul of the Kubernetes project. Uh but we have one problem. Usually contribution status is um man um counted by how much do we actually commit to to the project on GitHub base and we have a lot of stuff for example YouTube

admin which don't do any commits but they do stuff so we need to recognize this and this is always like a lot of manual work and uh we have a ton of sub projects uh and those sub projects are basically the ones that uh contribes and there you see like small parts of where you could engage and what they would do. And uh we are always happy

to yeah walk you through where you might fit in or could contribute on different basis because we are also basically need people that do project management because yeah it's a big software project and you also need a project manager some in in some parts and uh we also do uh do maintainer documentation like how to do stuff for the project or how to um give social media

messages. Probably everyone of you saw the LinkedIn Kubernetes account that's managed by us or the X account that is also managed by us. And we also oversee the mentoring program. So that's everything that who uh comes into the project on a mentoring base. This is also managed by us and we also do elections because uh kubernetes is a democracy and you can uh steering is voted by

and the code of conduct committee is voted by our own tool which we will hear in a bit. So I did a little bit of contributor coms and I also slightly touched it already. So we have the LinkedIn account and uh LinkedIn is our fastest growing social media channel that we have. uh and this growth for over 13,000 people in the uh in the past year. uh

we still have some growth in the Kubernetes uh X account and we have something and that's a special one which is K's contributors which is basically uh communication mainly for contributors and another way that is being used by contributors and by other folks is LWKD which will tell you about. Uh so hey everyone. Oh uh so hey everyone. So LWKD is a like sub project of contrabex

uh right now. So yeah so like uh because Kubernetes is a like uh so uh large project uh and uh so there is an uh problem like if you are uh even if you are like contributing to one part of it or let's say uh you are trying to like uh be just like up to date uh like what's going on uh in the Kubernetes project. So

because it is like so large uh there's this uh problem where uh like uh uh um like be updated like if you want to be updated for like every part of it then uh it's very difficult. So like uh uh back in 2018 uh Jos Burkus started uh a newsletter like we tried to solve this problem via a newsletter. So, LWKD is last week in Kubernetes uh

Kubernetes development and uh uh basically we uh publish this newsletter like every week uh and like I will go through like what the newsletter letter contains and how we uh basically like do it. So like uh if I want to like summarize uh uh like uh everything going on in the Kubernetes community we uh summarize it uh in the newsletter whether uh it be like release a

schedule or like uh uh like are there any CFPs open like if you are curious about it or like uh maybe some projects have like promoted to like GA. So everything like uh this uh sort of stuff is covered in the newsletter also. We uh also mention like all the weekly PR like what PS are merged in the project. So that is about it. Also we highlight

uh news about the community stuff like uh if there are like any events happening. So that is there. Now uh basically uh to check out LWKD you can go to the lwkd.info info uh and you can find every issue over there. Uh also like you can get uh uh like you can uh subscribe to the LWKD newsletter which uh you can find on the LWKD website as

well or like here is the link. Uh we also uh like LWKD is also present on blue sky and methodon. So you can follow us over there as well. Now uh uh let me uh like show you like the different sections of LWKD and how the newsletter actually looks. So this is uh the website lwkd.info. As you can see like we have different issues like we do

it like uh weekly. So like every week there is an issue and like if you click open like any of these uh so it will look something like this. So like uh I picked up like a random one like January 25. Uh so basically uh it covers that particular week like week ending January 25. So the previous uh all the news from the pre previous week will

be highlighted in the isue. So uh let's talk about it like so the very first section is like developer news. So it's basically it it is basically uh the visor e ecosystem news like whether it is some CFP uh opens or like if there is a like major change. Uh also this also includes like uh if there are any uh working groups updates or like if a

working group is dissolved. Uh so that Second uh we uh like as you all know Kubernetes uh has a like very uh uh like uh Kubernetes have a very uh good uh release schedule like uh Kubernetes follow a really good release cycle. So all the release updates are mentioned uh in this section. So um like uh throughout the release cycle we do that. So uh these are

the things like whatever the deadlines are uh you can like check out here. So like if you are contri contributing a particular project or if you are like writing a cap and you just want to uh check deadlines you can like just open LWKT for that. Uh then we have uh featured PR section and now uh this one is like uh we try to uh like there

there are a lot of PR which got merged in Kubernetes every week. So what we try here is uh we try here to like scout the PR which are like most significant to the users. So the criteria of the featured PR is like uh quite simple like if there is any user facing changes like for a basic example uh we all use like cube cutter right so

if there is a feature flag change which is uh like most of the users will notice it or if there is uh any significant change which all of the users like uh should know about uh that can qualify as a featured PR. So we basically highlight the PR which impact the project significantly. So this is uh like this is what featured PR section is about. Uh then

we have cap of the week. Uh so the idea is similar like we try to highlight uh a Kubernetes enhancement proposal like uh Kubernetes uh have this cap enhancement board uh where all the Kubernetes enhancement proposals are there. So the idea is very similar to the featured PR uh where we try to uh like where we try to like highlight the cap which impact uh uh like

most of the users. Uh so if uh there's a user uh like user facing change or if there is something which is like changing core functionality of the project uh you can find it here. Uh then uh we have uh can you go back? Uh okay. So uh there's slight change like uh that issue doesn't contains like other merges. So other merges are uh like these are

most of the PS which got merged uh on like at that week. So these are like other merges and like it also has like uh subsections like promotions. For example, if uh some uh uh feature got promoted to uh beta version uh we will mention that there. Then we have like version updates like uh if there are any uh tools or like uh sub projects which uh

get version updates that will be mentioned there. Uh then we have sub projects and dependency updates. So like uh Kubernetes have lots of like sister projects which uh it depends on. So all of the sub projects and dependency updates uh will be here. Now uh the last one is like shout outs like if you uh uh like if you are on the Kubernetes Slack there's a channel

uh which is like uh named at shoutouts. So we like we uh picked up the shout out section from here. So anyone who is like significantly contributing to Kubernetes or like uh if uh like that week uh they are like doing the amazing amazing work uh uh they will be mentioned here and the criteria is very simple uh anyone who likes to like give a shout out

to any community member from that like from their team they can like just put the post the shout out in the shout out channel and we will like pick it up. So this is how it is. Uh second is like GitHub management and uh like this is all about LWKD like uh before handing it over to Nabun just uh like uh call for help. We are looking

for active contributors. So if you like willing to uh like contribute to LWKD uh you can just uh reach out to us in contracom or like to me or like anyone else here we can help you get started. So yeah over to Nab. Hey everyone. So um first I'd like to thank Arpit for making it. Um he did a really amazing travel started travel like yesterday and

reach the venue like just 15 minutes before the talk began. So some shout outs like because of all the travel restrictions like it's tough to travel from one side of the globe to this side of the globe and just wanted to acknowledge the fact um also one key metric that Mario talked about was the LinkedIn presence uh which grew by uh 147%. Also shout out to the

coms team because they just acquired credentials to the LinkedIn account I guess last year or uh 15 16 months back and it has been a huge boon since then. So now coming to my areas uh get a management uh it's no wonder that uh Kubernetes uh enterprise organization has about 330 plus repos across like six managed organizations. Uh this is counting only the active organizations. There are

like hell lot of archived retired repos that we don't even like count at this point because we don't need to do active management on them. We also need to manage like 1600 plus uh contributors to Kubernetes. These are the active and non-active members um to the Kubernetes organizations. Um so we do everything using this uh configuration repo uh Kubernetes/org. uh think of this as like a githops

um overview of all of the Kubernetes management. We are trying to onboard like few other features as well whichever is supported by the GitHub APIs. Coming to some um overview between Cubecon NA 2025 and today we have almost like 100 plus members added since then we have like eight repo migrations creations or archivals till since then considering like it's been what just two months of work because

December usually goes by like the global vacation season um we usually have a lot of work maintaining those the member additions removals are quite automated right now thanks to um NMC's like uh Jason who helps really a lot in adding members um vetting all requests whether they're legit or not we have quite a high bar for adding members uh because that gives access to the infra to

everyone to run CI and we want to keep it really secure and gated to people who actually need Now what are we up to next? Some very important things that we are doing. One is on policies on AI GitHub ext extensions and apps. People um like our contributors and maintainers they're requesting access to things like GitHub copilot or code rabbit or clawed code. Uh we want to

make sure like we have adequate protections checks and balances while we enable those integrations and we don't run into issues where uh AI slop can in or which can increase maintainer burnout which we are dealing with anyway. We don't we want to help contributors rather than make their lives harder. Since we saw like we have 8,900 reviewers that's the total global count. Uh I would assume like

the number of really active ones the would be much less keeping uh the bus factor really low in the project. Then one other thing that we are trying to do is uh putting up a good policy in usage of GitHub actions. We have seen several like flaws uh in the recent past even last week on how people can trick GitHub actions or use GitHub actions into doing

weird things. We are also working with the GitHub team itself. Thanks to them kudos to them like they're listening to us on like what our requirements are. They're listening to the community. They're listening to the maintenance community on what they can do. Uh one big shout out to Priyanka. Um what she did last two last day like Sunday evening was quite phenomenal. Uh she went ahead and

scraped through almost all the repos in the Kubernetes GitHub orgs and figured out all the GitHub action usages which were non SHA usages and raised PRs to move everything to SHA based usages like day zero protection at best. Uh we were talking about this um on Sunday itself and we have a fix. What the second point really talks about is like day one and day two protections

that we can introduce in the community to make sure like this doesn't happen anymore. We are in talks with GitHub also to how to prevent people putting such things. We are not much concerned about our own in-house infra because most of the code gets protected by the same mechanisms that we have built over the years on like reviewers. people need to review LGTM approve uh non-rusted contributors

like new uh non-org member contributors can't really run CI and extract code or extract secrets there have been some instances um in the past which people will talk >> um thanks to Peter for maintaining prow forever >> thank you >> also I'll just do a speedrun because we have very few minutes left and we also do yearly cleaning up the org um Anyone who has not made

any contributions which means no comments, no commits, nothing they get removed from the org because we want to keep u a minimal set of people who have elevated access. Coming to elections, um Contrabex helps run three key elections in the community directly or indirectly through a project called Eleto. It's the in-house uh saves based uh tool that we use. Caves is just a ranking algorithm. uh electro

needs help. Uh it has been run by only a couple of contributors for a major part of its life cycle. So there has been a working session yesterday. Unfortunately we don't have a recording for it but you can meet the people at the meet and greet uh tomorrow. Um more on meet and greets. We do have an events team which has been conducting such things. Um majorly

you might have known something called Kubernetes contributor summit which has now graduated to something called a CNCF maintainer summit which happened on Sunday. Um then again like coming back to meet and greet uh we still organize meet and greets thanks to the team who are keeping on sustaining it and thanks to like CNCF who gives us an avenue like every cubecon during lunch where people like Kubernetes

contributors can meet with the general community. Having said that I give back the stage to Priyanka >> um and please stay with me. We have some more things that are actually meant for people who want to join us. Uh people who are new contributors to the project and looking forward to opportunities on how to get started. Um before I just move to that section, a big shout

out to people who are recently working a lot on improving our contributor side which is kubernetes.dev. Um shout out to Christopher, shout out to Praj who have made a lot of progress, lot of improvements to make sure all the contents that is meant for new contributors now show up on the homepage, show up right where it is supposed to be there. Um and bunch of those uh

improvements are listed here. Now the mentoring part. So if you want to be part of the Kubernetes project in any area of the Kubernetes project, what do we have? Uh from SIG contributor side, we offer several avenues. Uh we try to cater two categories. One is definitely the new contributor, we need more and more people joining. So even though we have a bar for new uh org

memberships, we do not want to gate cape. It's not that high a bar. It's just enough so that we keep our org safe. Um so that is one audience and the another one is we want to grow those new contributors through maintainers because our reviewer count is very less the 9,000 people is hardly anything when it comes to the amount of PRs we are getting every day

and now with code agents that is even more so we not only have to review PR we have to review a lot of PRs coming from tools um and we do not want to like discourage that we are trying to place and policies to make that also a good u a venue for contribution. So how do we do that? Uh the first one major one new contributor

orientation that is for anybody who wants to join the Kubernetes project and who wants to join on day one who wants to understand how this whole project is structured uh what the governance looks like how the whole project is divided into SIGs and working group and which SIGs can fit for somebody and even in the end I think we also talk about what are the latest and

greatest um new first issues or opportunities is to participate in those particular areas. Followed by that we also have other external mentorship opportunities. We Kubernetes and uh sub projects participate in projects like Google summer of code, LFX mentorship and outreachy. And finally we have group mentoring cohorts that is to cater the area where we have sub projects that need help but we do not have reviewers or

maintainers to keep them running. So that those cohorts are mainly uh meant to uh aim at people who have been contributing very actively but do not have the named approver or reviewer role yet and we want to help them get that. So NCO I want to give a huge shout out to the people who are running these NCO sessions every month twice and not just every month

twice we also are going to have one today um sometime uh after we have a lot of great success stories we have some people right now Christopher I mentioned who also started his journey from NCO itself uh about 6 to 8 months back and now he's already on his path to become a prover in one of the contrabook sub project. So I'll leave the um mentions and

these are some of the their own uh personal stories. So we will have them in the handout notes. Um this is the main part. If uh you want to participate in one of those NCO sessions, the next one is going to happen on April 21 and we'll have two uh sessions. one aimed at APAC MEA audience and another one is for Americas. So you can uh scan

those QR codes to get the calendar invite. Just make sure you are logged in into a Google account so that you get the invite. And if none of those timings work for you, we also have recordings of all our previous um NCO sessions in this playlist. So you can scan this. This is a YouTube playlist of all the um previous NCO sessions. And like I mentioned uh

there is one that's going to happen today at uh 2:00 so right after lunch and that will be hosted by our pit. So um and bunch of us will be there as well. Yeah. Um wrapping up if you want to find us if you want want to find any uh one from sig contra or if you are on your journey to get started and you just want

to find somebody to talk to you can find us uh in these avenues. You can join Kubernetes Slack on slack.ks.io IO and maybe drop a message in SIG contraix and for all the other sub projects we discussed like LWKD um elections etc we have dedicated channels for those also so you can drop a message there um for all the meeting invites you need to join the mailing

list but we also uh have the mailing list also gets more and more updates from the sik coming in so that's there uh there is a landing page for NCO so if you did not um get a chance to scan the QR code. You can search for new contributor orientation and you'll find a landing page on kubernetes.dev. And finally, all of us meet uh twice every week

or um yeah, every other week. Yeah. So, we have one um in Apac that's 8:30 a.m. UTC time and another one in America's which is 5:00 p.m. UTC. These are the major uh contrabex meetings and we have other sub project meetings also happening. If you join the mailing list, you will get invited. With that, um, thank you. Um, and this is our QR code. If you, if

you want to drop a feedback for us, please do. And we are open to Q&A. >> Thank you for staying here and listening to us. >> And enjoy coupon. >> Yes. >> Any questions? >> Thank you. That was >> great. Thanks. Thanks for uh highlighting the new contributor orientation. This was why I was looking for to maybe get my colleagues more active in the community. I don't

expect them to contribute much to Kubernetes itself, but rather the tools around it in CNCF like Argo. Is that in scope for the NCO? >> No. Um so the NCO is strictly only for the Kubernetes thing because we explain the beast that Kubernetes itself is. Um what is working there is uh um basically for Argo just point them to the um to the channels that Argo is

listening and there they usually also have like onboarding channels and uh you also can ping us and we can basically introduce you to folks from Argo because most of the maintainers for CNCF projects are not maintaining a single CNCF project. They are usually know each other. That's also why we have maintain summit. >> Also just to add the Argo CD channels would be on CNCF workspace. Kubernetes

when we talk about these are on a separate Slack workspace. So yeah. >> Any other question? If not, enjoy the rest of the first day of CubeCon and see you