What Community Means Now – InApps 2022

InApps writes about application development and management at scale. Our focus is on providing explanation and analysis of technology ecosystems.

Today, more than anything else, we are here at KubeCon because we are a community. A community that is centered around technologies that promise us something more. A way out of something binding and closed.

The concept of Kubernetes is liberating. It’s about scaling out — the freedom to use data to liberate us to achieve something new, something not possible before.

That’s not always necessarily a good thing. With unbound growth, with no constraints, there are consequences. Without goals, without diverse reputation, without many voices, there is a logical result. That’s seen in authoritarian, unbending viewpoints and intolerance.

Scale in our world is about technology across distributed platforms. It means understanding its impacts on applications and how automated services are built and managed.

Today, the Kubernetes community is on the verge of even greater growth than it has to this point. According to Bitergia, 51 percent (638/1263) of all authors to the eight main Kubernetes repositories made their first contribution since January 1, 2016. But delays for resolving pull requests have increased from .95 median days in 2016 to 1.75 media days in 2016. With the increasing scope of the project, the number of issues rose dramatically (743 in 2015 to 3,570 year-to-date in 2016), but the average days an issue was open declined form 385 in 2015 to 157.

KubeCon is packed. People here want to build in new ways. But how we manage that growth is also a big question. The growth will be unrepresentative if developed by only a few people, of the same backgrounds, the same majority. Continue that pattern, then the world of open source communities have a problem. Then it is not egalitarian at all.

The open source community is in need of far greater diversity. The goal for us all, and I think the goal of open source, is to become more participatory. So how do we do that?

Our pancake breakfasts are usually lighthearted events, a way to kick off the day at a conference among peers. The range of topics is mostly technical. Today, I’d like us to talk about community and what it means to us now more than ever.

I am not sure who will be at the breakfast and how they lean politically. But I don’t really think that is really what matters most right now.

More so, what does community mean to us all? What joins us together? What divides us? How do communities mend and is there a comparison to society and the socio-economic divides that are so apparent in this election?

See you at the breakfast.