All right, folks, thank you for waiting what we had a little bit of a longer break.
With this next talk from vibrant to silent, the names of pattern of communities are seeing
these days that activity can look really great on paper, issues, PRs, downloads, but then
the community voice feels quieter.
There's fewer discussions, fewer volunteers, and less visible ownership.
So please welcome Prithi Raj, who's going to explore what might be driving the shift and
what community leaders can do to re-engage people in all the different ways.
Good afternoon, everyone, where you want me to come to my talk.
Usually what happens is if I'm giving a talk at a conference on a Sunday afternoon,
I'll see hardly two people attend that talk, but glad so many people are joining in.
I won't treat this as a talk, it's more of a rant to be honest.
I've been a community manager for six years now, and I've seen quite a bit of a transition.
Let's start with this, this happened a couple of days ago, and this is what is going on
at most of the companies, AWS as an example.
They laid off their community team, their community builders program manager, the head
of AWS community, and this speaks volumes of where we are headed in terms of, you know,
prioritizing community community initiatives, how most organizations are seeing communities
or how they're approaching the community mindset.
And if I have to take a couple of more examples, I mean, these are examples from different
ecosystems altogether, but how many of you are using ingress, engineers in your infrastructure
or ecosystems?
I see a few hands, but I'm sure most of you might be aware, and then people were asked to
move to get way API because in fact, the sick could not maintain ingress, engineers because
of lack of contributors, of lack of, maintain a shape, and similarly, when it came to
contributing to docs, there was this program called Google Season of Docs, I'm sure a few
of you might be aware of it.
It lasted for five years, got in some doc contributions, but again, installed around a couple
of years ago, it concluded there was not amplitude budget, Google was cutting down on some
of its initiatives.
I was just entering the campus and someone had pasted a lot of stickers with said
fun Google.
So, I mean, I can see there's a sense of change in the community or how they have
a mindset towards companies or companies, how they are taking community initiatives forward
with this quick intro about myself, my name is Pichiraj, I'm a CNCF ambassador.
This has been my journey, I usually run platform engineering community meetups around
Bangalore and other than that, some community initiatives.
I've mostly been involved with the CNCF, I know that a lot of folks who are attending
this conference are not well-versed with CNCF, but just a show of hands, how many of you
are worst with CNCF or CNCF projects.
A few folks, because we'll be discussing the state of CNCF projects in terms of open-source
project health, so just a quick intro about myself.
Usually this is the slide I use, what's on the agenda, we will find out, but today I have
built some what an agenda for all of us, what we'll talk about, we'll define community
in this talk or what I want to suggest in terms of what's community and how community
has developed or what's the future for the community looking like.
And of course, we'll talk about symptoms, what's happening, how project health have improved
or gone down, we'll look at some examples, root causes and can we bring back the community
voice.
So before I start, let me quote one of these quotes from 1600s, which is still valid,
I believe each and every member present here, drives the community community is like a
ship and you need to take the community forward.
When I say things have gone silent or from vibrant community, we have moved towards silence.
I believe one of the most important things that have happened is we are seeing that we are
growing in terms of numbers, there are a lot of contributors coming in, GitHub comes in with
an October, CNCF comes in with an annual survey, many Azure comes in with a survey, there
are many community events happening, QCorn is growing in terms of numbers, members.
But I feel that the main community, which is the maintainers, the contributors and the users,
there's a burnout, I have noticed that the amount of contributors that were part of one
project they have reduced, there's one particular company that is sponsoring a project or
that is running ship for a project, maintainer burnout is a very important aspect today,
maintainers are getting burned out, maintainers are asked to focus more on end user products
projects and that's where I feel that the shift from the community mindset has changed and
we have moved towards more of a proprietary mindset and community has become a bi-product
of it.
And that's how I define community, I think it's a definition which is open to acceptance
by each and every person in the community, I feel that a community is built of three layers,
of course the layer number one is users, people are consuming the projects, layer number
to the contributors who are helping build the project and of course the maintainers who
are helping maintain the project, helping build the road maps, take care of security,
release management and these three aspects in itself have problems at individual levels,
the real challenge of course today is the change in business dynamics, there's a lack
of community mindset, a lot of companies which started off with the community team have shifted,
I'll give you an example of myself, I was working for a company where I had my manager
who was the head of community and suddenly one day the company decided that we don't
want to have a community team anymore, during lunch we discussed that we'll have a couple
of sprints, we'll talk about a lot of things around community and by evening my manager
was fired, so that's how the community mindset is shifting, there's a misinterpretation
of community people believe that there's a community, of course there's a community for each
and every tool but people believe that you can build community around anything or everything
and that's where people are focused more on building community on end user tools rather than
building, having the community or the open source mindset and of course there are too many events,
too many channels, I saw there are it's just February and there are already 1500 conferences
scheduled for this year and we are just in February, so of course there are a lot of events
that are happening but are we talking community are we talking open source, I still feel that
the lines are actually blurred in today's ecosystem, so we'll of course discuss three problems,
maintain a contributor and user problems, so the idea today is that most of the open source projects
are many critical versus projects depend on a very small maintainer set, there are four maintainers
who are maintaining the project, they are the contributors itself, the users, raise some fixes,
enhancements or a PR or an issue here and there but there's no major contribution that's happening,
of course maintainer burnout is a spoke about it's one of the major reasons,
maintainers are asked to focus on security, we are moving towards more secure software
and CVs dependencies that adds as a major risk and of course once there's a maintainer burnout
the project suffers, similarly there's a contributor problem, I have seen a lot of folks joining
the community, they want to contribute to projects but they are not clear on how they can
actually gain from it, they don't want to stick to a single project, many people are job seekers,
they want to contribute to a project in terms of mentorship or getting a job eventually from
the sponsor company but that that doesn't stick for long and contributors move away from projects
and of course there's a mentorship problem as well, I see there are a lot of mentorship projects
which have mentors but mentors don't eventually have time to help these mentees become
core contributors to the project or there's an incentive shift of course,
where from a contribution standpoint folks are moved to a capture,
mine share rather than actually focusing on good contributions,
so these are examples of two CNCF projects and there are many CNCF projects out there,
I have just taken two examples, the health is adhered, health is excellent but you see the red
flags there, the contributor dependency and the organization dependency, there's one contributor
which accounts for 51 plus percent of contributions for contour and for Falco we have four
contributors and just one organization that is doing most of the contributions and if you see most
of the OSS projects in the CNCF landscape CD foundation or other landscapes, it's barely five
to six contributors who are running the project, it's one or at max two organizations that
account for most of the contributions to the project and that's not healthy because if one
organization falls or a few contributors are a couple of maintainers decide to not contribute to
the project, the project falls and the user problem of course end users want to consume the project,
they are not ready to contribute back, communities are not getting any automation, they don't want
to support the users, many companies have stopped investing in open source projects and it's again
become hard to enter for many companies as well, as I spoke about 1500 conferences, schedule already,
there's an event inflation, I mean I think for them would be one opportunity that I got to present
this land but many conferences might not even accept this talk because they feel it's a it's a violation
but of course we are talking about more tools, more contributions but has it reflected in reality
this is a metric that I have generated according to the conferences that I have attended
the people that we have come across or the people we met at
conference boots hardly 1% of the conference attendees eventually contribute back to the project,
they'll come to your boots, they'll get their swag, they'll get their stickers but never come back
to contribute, the attendance to contribute contribution conversion rate has been minimal until now
so this sponsors sustainability challenges the issue like our company is creating this challenge
as I spoke about the end users don't want to contribute back to the project, there is an open source
mismatch, they believe that the open source model should make them money but if it does not or if
they are not moving towards that kind of a direction they pull the plug and decide to not
contribute to the project, there are a lot of folks who don't have a community team or an open source
program office and that's where there's a mindset mismatch so how companies control projects
this is true to many projects that are out there they ensure that the the sponsor company is
having control over the open source project even if you see that it's open source it's hosted
by the CNCF the image out there the maintainers who the of course I being paid by these companies
are forced to drive road map according to them there's an unclear governance or maintainer paths
not a lot of contributions are allowed even if an end user wants to contribute something which
is beneficial for the community there are blockers or these issues don't get mitigated or
PRs are not merged within particular timelines and features are prioritized according to
the companies the sponsor company is benefit or the product strategy and that I believe is the
largest threat flag today it has I mean cease to exist for the longest of the time but that's
that I believe is the biggest threat flag that an open source project can have and that's where
democratizing is essential the stakeholders need to be defined maintainers as soon as they start
their project or believe that there can be possible threats they need to ensure that multiple
maintainers from different companies exist they are building the contribute a pool and they are
ensuring that your projects have the right stakeholders so that even if there's pressure from
companies there's a possible stoppage of sponsorship towards the project the project stays on
here's my personal experience I I don't want to read out a lot of it but in recent times
I believe that there's been an empathy that's missing in in the community or from community events
itself whenever I go towards organizing a community event or reach out to folks on ensuring that
a community event sustains does well they talk about sponsorship but they don't talk about the
the contributor value or the output a contributor street the community more as for their personal
PR they want to showcase different images on LinkedIn or Slack that we are creating value but
the real value creation I feel has been diminished and community initiatives are not growing I saw
one of these mentorship programs their stipend has not grown in the last 6 years I mean if I
talk about India the inflation is 7% and for 2% I mean should have grown in 6 years but the
stipend has not grown even 1% in the last 6 years and that doesn't incentivize mentees and of
course there's a lot of reliance on AI most of the folks out there are using AI to complete their
mentorship programs or contribute code where the code quality as you know suffers of course
so I'll take an example this is a community that I worked for for five years it's the chaos
engineering community today this Slack does not exist at one point in time it had 10,000 for
and 10,000 plus members and I'll I'll cite some instances or reasons why it happened of course
these were the three community events that were happening all three of them are shut I think
somewhere converted to proprietary or enterprise native events but what really happened
of course the community Slack was disbanded there was a white paper that was being worked on or
research paper that was essential for the community to grow for people to understand what's
about chaos engineering and this is more from an open source community perspective that I'm speaking
of most prominent projects suffered we'll we'll see a couple of graphs as well there were no
mentorship programs or even if there are mentorship programs hardly the mentors have found time to
contribute or help mentees grow of course the platforms to advocate reduced today if I have to
talk about prominent conferences even the maintainer track talks are not getting accepted and that's
kind of sad for the community and of course community events as I spoke about stall
contributor retention has diminished and you barely see the folks who were contributing
and they were stalwarts like Disney HBO they are not contributing to the community anymore
so you see this is one of the most popular chaos engineering projects and this is how
contributions diminished over time this is one of the graphs of commits and how commits have
lowered it it was in its prime around 2021 when I was contributing to the community itself
but this is what has happened and this is the same with chaos toolkit the project is not growing
anymore there are no contributions post-training 24 and this speaks volumes of how many ecosystems
many community is suffering we might not see it out there because there are flashy projects as well
which are important to end users which are important to sell and they are of course getting much
of the attention much of the contributions but many projects and even a project like flux I'm sure
some of you might be aware of flux you saw the example early I talked about health as soon as
we've worked stopped there was a concern on how flux moves forward in spite of being a CNC
graduated project and a few of you might know what CNC of graduation means and this is what we
see in terms of commits of course it peaked around 2021 that was the peak for a lot of open
source projects people were sitting at home contributing left and right but you see the red mark
is where the company closed down and then again the yellow mark speaks about how commits are again
getting reduced in spite of some other companies trying to invest in the project or hiring the
maintainers to to maintain the project itself and there are multiple stories of projects getting
archive there are a lot of stats that people talk about projects that came into the particular
organization or people talk about projects that graduated but you see these are the projects that
got archived and how their contributions started at immediately like at one point in time they were
growing like anything and immediately once the maintainership stopped there was no one else to take
over the project these are just couple of examples there are many examples out there in the last
two and half years 22 projects where archive which basically means there was no one to maintain
the project health was almost zero or close to zero so what does the future look like I hope I
have a minute or two with me and according to me if we move at the same pace of course contributions
will be centered around certain projects your VLLMs, Olamah, Kubernetes and other projects which
of course sub-serve enterprise interest but many budding projects might not make it there are so
many projects out there that are looking for contributors, maintainers and I believe that it's
it's on us to help them grow and of course commercial events might define what the OSS community
looks like but not the real events of course I believe in sticking to the basics this is these are
some steps that can just kick start this initiative collaborating with other open source projects
ensuring that there is enough contributors to the participation having a community champion program
if you run an open source community so that you keep ensuring that there are people who want to
get involved in technical or non-technical contributions and try to run more community centric events
of course I have just structured this at a community level there are various steps that can be taken
of course content is king putting it out there continuously that there's a community and this is what
is being done it can be releases it can be talking about tooling integrations organizing meetups
on the larger ecosystem or the overall outreach and ensuring that you analyze your matrix
regularly and these are some points this is completely personal or opinionated but yeah this is what
you can do to bring back your voice I cannot read it through because we are almost in time but yeah
the list is non exhaustive and I hope we can have larger discussions on ensuring that the voice
stays and the community keeps growing so this is the last coat I have this is not by someone
from 1600s but AI generated but thank you so much for participating and I appreciate the large
audience here on a Sunday afternoon when people mostly want to grab lunch thank you so much for joining
in I appreciate it we have we have a few minutes for questions any questions
just raise your hand I will come to you with the mic okay we have a feel like Oprah
thank you very nice talk do you see this is an overall trend across the entire open source
ecosystem that projects are dying out or are there just some projects dying while new ones are
also being born I agree to this fact that some projects are dying and some projects are again
I mean you see a lot of projects coming in the ecosystem as I spoke about that contributors are
growing but I also sense that the projects that are dying are higher in number in terms of quality
like there are quality projects which are dying but the new projects that are coming in some projects
whole quality but many of them might not hold the quality in comparison to the projects that
are getting killed or not being maintained anymore and why I speak highly of it is because of course
I feel that that's the chain or that's the life cycle that opensource in itself has that new
projects will come in many projects will phase out but why I share this concern is because I see
that this is coming in as a repeated pattern and once things become a pattern it it doesn't take
time to you know just inject into the ecosystem so that's why I share this concern
any other questions anyone oh oh you take how do you suggest a sponsor companies and users
help this problem what can they do if they're not contributing I think it has to be a mindset
shift because mostly companies are looking at an ROI how many leads are we generating how many
people will eventually pay for the tool but I think this mindset needs to change and that's where
I suggested having a community or an open source program of a sort of a mindset where people see
the real value of tooling or the larger ecosystem and if I am sponsoring a conference or if I want to
engage more with the community it should be more about yes I am putting value to open source or
I believe in the community mindset rather than eventually looking at your lead count and feeling
disappointed that we don't have five paying customers or calls eventually so I feel it has to be
a mindset shift rather than just getting into task but hopefully with time we see people because
I feel around 2019 through 2022 or 2021 there was a huge open source mindset boom which I personally
noticed and then slowly it has been facing out in the last two and half three years but
hopefully we again see that mindset shift and more emphasis on open source of course
I think one more quick question if anyone has one raise your hand okay I'm going to move really
quickly raise your hand one more time and so I can zero my time don't you think that like in
most of the projects that have the situation at some point of time they basically die
isn't it related also to how the governance of this project was shaped and it's working
because like I remember when I joined one of the projects and I had this electricity that I got paid
to work on the project and we had like pretty strong team but what we did from the very beginning
was we kind of set up the team and we first simulated what's going to happen to the project once
we get laid off like it happened three years ago so we from the very beginning we're always
pushing for a governance where like whatever features we're adding it's always in open it's always
like trying to really build an open governance where like again simulating what's going to happen
once we were laid off and what do you think about this governance absolutely I absolutely agree with you
actually and I'm so sorry to put everyone off but we're we're out of time and there's a
cue of people outside of the gate into the next session so we need these five minutes to turn that
thank you so much everyone I do