Donia Chaiehloudj & Troy Connor on Merge Forward & Open Source Inclusion | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025

Hey everyone, we're back. We're here at, uh, Q Con Live. It's Wednesday, it's the afternoon.

Well, it's, what is it? Well, it's three o'clock already. Um, let me introduce you to our next guest here in our next interview.

I got some tough names. Let me start with the tough one on the end here. Corey.

How you doing? Troy. Troy.

That's why they're tough Names Troy. And this is Mary. No, it's not.

Nope. Troy, first of all, if you don't mind, look at this camera for this one. Okay.

But introduce yourself to the audience. I'm Troy Connor. I'm a senior software engineer at Microsoft.

I also help maintain some of the CNCF projects you see out here on the screen. So that's a bit about me. Absolutely.

Unfortunately, they're seeing this way. They don't see this, this way. There's rows and rows of CNCF projects out there, but, um, you know, sometimes I wish we could pick up the camera and just turn it around Pan, but we can't.

But Troy, thank you. Thank You. This one I practiced a little bit.

I'm still gonna mess it up. Dunya Not quite. Okay.

You say it. Yeah. Hi everyone, I'm Dunya Shalu.

I'm a software engineer and part of the community team at ISO Valent at Cisco, and I'm part of the maintainers of working on that project, um, here, part of the Cloud Native foundation. And I'm also part of the Merge Forward initiative. And that's why we are here today.

I'm gonna ask you to repeat just the end of that slowly, so make sure they got it. Which one? The merge forward part.

The merge forward part. So I'm here today to represent the Merge Forward Initiative, and that's why we are here today. Excellent.

Now, most of the people out here are not familiar with the initiative, so it's not a name, but what is it? So Merge Forward is the umbrella behind seven community groups. This is community driven and we are trying to build awareness and relationship among the cloud native, uh, community, uh, bring more diversity because in our current world with AI acceleration especially, that's very important to have more maintainers.

Maybe you've heard about the burnout of all the maintainers currently happening, and that very essential that we are building more, uh, diverse community in general, but build bringing more people into the maintainers track, um, and diversity and building these kind of groups is very important for that. So I I I have some opinions. Yeah.

I've been involved in the open source community for 25 Yeah. Plus years for way too long. For far too many years.

Maintainers were like, um, I'm trying to think of the right word, Like a silent minority. No one, no one cared. No one, no one ever said, oh, the not maintainer.

He, you know, he, he's, he's, he's working two jobs, right? He's got a day job doing whatever they do. And then they got a night job maintaining this open source project.

And it's one thing if you got a little neighborhood project, you know, it's something you wrote because it was something you wanted to do for what you were doing, and you just donated it out open source wise. You had, I don't know, a couple hundred people maybe were using it, but some of these, you know, as the open source projects blew up and now, you know, being a maintainer is more than a full-time job. More than a full-time job.

Absolutely. And so, But no, you know, you know what I learned from, I went to law school when I was younger. If you're not being paid, it's not a job.

It's a hobby. Yep. That's, and too many maintainer, most maintain as the norm was maintainers didn't get paid.

They did it as a hobby. They did it for love of what they were doing for look, you know, for their, it, it was a, a, a passion but not a job. 'cause they weren't getting paid.

And I think one of the nice things about Linux Foundation, cloud Native Computing Foundation is all of a sudden by getting support from a whole bunch of different, you know, parties to the open source, uh, community, we had the ability, or we have the ability to pay some of the maintainers. Mm-hmm. No one's getting rich, being a maintainer.

Let, let's, let's be real. No one's getting rich. Yeah.

But at least you get some compensation rather than a pat on the back and an attaboy. Right. Uh, for, for what they do, that's where we are.

But what do we aspire to? Do you wanna take The question? Yeah, absolutely.

I think, um, even for the initiative we're driving with Merge Forward, I think there's a access problem with how we can actually contribute to open source. So, like you mentioned, there's a, it's a unsung group of people who are the heroes behind some of the software that are being consumed by everybody. However, because that is mostly driven by different groups of people trying to contribute from the lowest end is not actually being materialized.

What we like to do, and even where my story begins, is actually de contributing to open source and driving some of those initiatives to allow ourselves to bring in more diverse people. So it's not just a subset, it's a larger group of people. It's going worldwide to where we're having overlaps and, and it's, you're not burning out.

We have a bigger group of people to help build these, these systems that are gonna be maintained by mostly everybody. Got it. I wanna, I wanna dive in on that a little bit.

You know, like I said, I've been in the open source world a long time. The fact is, back in, you know, the early two thousands when I was really involved, and since then, most open source projects have this profile maintainers under, under six, right. Under the biggest projects, uh, people who actually contribute code, usually in the average project, you could count 'em on two hands, maybe one foot.

Right. 12, 15 people a really big project. You might have 20 people that actually contribute accepted code to a project.

There are exceptions, but on, on average, people who were even willing to, to beta test report bugs be involved in the community other than just taking the software and using it, three to 4% of the total users in the community are active at that level. Mm. Three to 4%.

But that's very intimidating. I think it is when you answer the open source word. Absolutely.

So that's why it's very important to guide people. You, you, you do mentorship like this is by these kind of actions that you are enabling new people to contribute, I feel. Why do you think they're intimidated?

I think that this is a word where you need to understand the code. Um, not the the proper software, but like the general code of how to behave E etiquette. Yeah.

I would, yeah, that's the word I think. And understand how to communicate with people. Async, what kind of language are you using?

How do you formulate feedback or questions? Um, just being open and not feeling the imposter syndrome. Understanding code base and asking questions, not being shy.

All this stuff that are can, that can be difficult for people, but they're, if they are guided, I feel they can go ahead, you know? So I don't mean to be insulting, so don't take it. I hope Not.

But from what you're describing to me, Yeah. That fact pattern transcends open source. That fact pattern describes why we don't have more women.

I Don't think it in, in technology. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's not only about women here or, Or diverse groups. Yeah. I think it's more about diverse.

And I realized that actually this week, especially because, so under the merge forward initiative, there are seven groups and there is one about the blind people Yes. And visually impaired. I, and one of the person couldn't come to the Kon because he didn't have someone to Work with Him.

Exactly. So that's why it's not only about women, but it's also about like trying to bring the right tools to the right people so they are actually able to contribute and come to this kind of even too, you know? Yeah.

And being part of the community. So it's, it goes beyond all of that. I say before, but there are also this dimension.

But I, I do want to add to that as well, because it's, I think when people talk about contributing to open source, they think it's just code. Yeah. They're like a lot of co non code contributions.

There's, you can, you can come to a meeting and take notes and become a scribe. You can actually, you know, host a session. You can mentor people and understand the process.

So even for underrepresented minorities, like the Deep Roots, um, organization under merged forward, their process isn't really defined because the contributor ladder exists. Yes. But to get into doing that, I think it's a barrier of entry most people are not familiar with.

So there's times at times there's people working all over the country that work for software industries. Right. But we may, they may not do things in a way where it's viable for open source.

They may work at an enterprise company where they don't share or even communicate because they get their things top down. Whereas open source, you're in a community of people who want the same thing for achievement. Uh, fair, fair enough.

What about even just like making bug reports? Yeah. That's part of, that's part Of it.

I mean, I, I'm not, you know, yeah. It's not the pinnacle. Right.

But it's still, it's being part of the community. So how do we, how do we flip this on its head, right? How do we, how do we say, Hey, 50% of the people who use the software do bug reports.

At least 10% of the people who are involved in a given project are, are joining our monthly virtual meetup or virtual, you know, uh, uh, you know, roadmap or, or what have you. How, how do you know, how do we get from here to there? It's weird because you have to try to build incentives.

And that incentive is, you know, the software that they're gonna be using that they're consuming is not only safe and secure, but trusted and that trust is built by community. So where that value begins is where the trust starts. And I think that's not only demonstrated with what we do here, but how businesses are built behind that.

If you take something like, you know, some companies build their product on open source things and have a relationship with the community because they trust them. Right. So if you think about all the technologies here that we are all consuming, we have, we, we build those bonds and are trusting using the software because we're in the community.

And I think that incentive in itself bridges the gap of domain knowledge, diverse talent that we can create and even, you know, money, which is probably driving a lot of, which was just driving a lot of the incentive, Never underestimate money. Right. Um, I get it.

But, and I think that just to, to, to bounce on that, it's by building safe places like we are doing, like if you go with people like-minded and that you identify to, it's easier, you know, to trust people. And then you can on top of that, then build software that are trustable and contribute to it. So if it's like a TU circle, then Yeah.

There's a lot of projects that actually failed to get it to gain adoption because the community was bad. Yeah. And refuse to, and then make something way better because they have people at the table to discuss those ideas there and not willing to shun them from contributing.

So it's, I love the, the fact that this conversations exist because it's never gonna stop having, we're never gonna stop having this conversation. And I think that helps us broaden the scope of what it means to be a part of the community. So let me ask you a question.

Is the best solution here, top down, bottom up, middle out, or all of the above? It's definitely a mix. It has to be a mix because everybody should be involved.

And if it's coming from the people, that's good because they have to be part of it. But the people above have to be supporting and sponsoring that kind of things. Well, in my mind, If I don't, you know, if the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?

Or does it matter? If people don't know about this sort of initiative, will it really do anything? Mm-hmm.

In my mind, the first thing I wanna go to is the, the maintainers of the open source project. The leaders of the o particular community and say, Hey, as much as you have a duty to make the best software we can here, you also have a duty. And it, and it behooves you.

It's in your best interest to make sure your community realizes that we have diversity, uh, initiatives in place, that we have safe spaces where maybe people who are not, uh, really, you know, experienced in in joining into software can be open source software community, can go at their own pace and feel safe and not intimidated and not beaten down or berated or, or something like that. org site or whatever the site is. Yeah.

Didn't know where it is in the GitHub notes. Yeah. And you know, every project always has its notes, right?

Mm-hmm. It needs to be in there so that if people don't know about it, they don't, then it doesn't exist. Yeah.

That's why I'm saying it's both ways because we have to recruit people to be part of these communities and they have to be aware of it. So we have this power coming from the community, you know, and at the same time, the ERs have to be aware because then they can recruit people. So that's why it's very important to have the two ways going on.

Yep. So how do we get the word out at the bottom of it? Yeah.

Right. To the people who really need to hear this. Yeah.

That's why you're here today. Well, I hope you're watching and you're hearing it. Exactly.

So yeah. So what we're doing, uh, it's that we are trying to raise awareness among the people in general on Slack channels. Uh, but also at KU Con here we have a kiosk with the merit forward where we are trying to, uh, raise awareness to people about the different groups.

We have all the speakers part of the community sharing a slide at the end of the talks about. Oh, that's Good. Yeah.

So we had one on the front stage on the main stage yesterday at the keynote. Yeah. Uh, at the keynote, um, and all other events.

And, um, at CubeCon we also have one community hub where there are sessions for all the communities across the, the week. So you can join for an hour and talk and share. And, uh, there is also a party with the coop crawl where you can join and just feeling welcome and connect with people.

So this is the, the kind of thing that is happening this week. Uh, but otherwise there is the Slack channel, people can join whenever they want. Uh, we have monthly meeting for the MER forward, but also for every group, Every Single group.

And, um, yeah, everything is Replayable on YouTube, so you can access that. So that, and even, even sharing the story, right? Yeah.

Like when people Yeah. No, I think it's about sharing. So I, I will tell you, I don't think it was last year.

It's CubeCon maybe the year before, maybe it was one of the European ones. We had another group that I'm sure is in. This is the deaf and hard of hearing.

Yeah. Yep. It's part of it.

And uh, oh, that was a fantastic, yeah, They did like a, they showed people how to sign and Yeah. And how they, how they, uh, how they JJ you know, jive, how they Yeah. How they do their thing within a, a mixed use group, let's call it no, who are not deaf and who are, you know, don't, aren't challenged in these ways.

But it, it, and it was really great. It was, you know, if you go on Textron TV and go back to past cube cons, you'll, you'll find it in there. You know, the video's still up.

Yeah. And, and it is a great thing, but it, it, you're right. It's, it's an all hands on deck effort, top, bottom, and middle to, to, to, to get this word out.

But here's the good news, we're all richer for it. 'cause the more inclusive we are, the wider the base. You don't know who's gonna come up with the next Oh Yeah.

Piece of code that unlocks something. Oh, yeah. Right.

Or is working on tomorrow's problem and you know, so we're all better for that. And, and, and quite frankly, right, kudos to the CNCF because they recognize that and they, they're, they're willing to put dollars and resources into this effort. Yeah.

Yeah. I think they understand the value. So Like, yeah, because there is a value, a value, there's a payback.

You probably can't remember the last K coupon that you were at where they didn't have interpreters doing the slide in it. Right. Because they understood there was a mark, not even a market, there was a people who needed to understand There's a community there, community, Right.

That, that needs that accessibility with all the things. So I think driving forward with this initiative that we're a part of it just expresses that volume for everyone. And I, I think, I think we're better for it.

Agree. I agree. It's so, you know what we didn't do though?

You told me there's a Slack channel. You didn't give us the URL, you didn't give us how to get on there. Okay.

How do people at home get involved? Yeah, So you can go on the CCF F Slack channel and then there is the Merge Forward channel specifically. And then there is one for each group.

Otherwise, you can go on the CNCF page of Merge Forward, the community group. You can subscribe to the newsletter, you will have all the events, all the community groups, and the best one. You're welcome.

I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Keep doing what you're doing, man.

It's good work. Appreciate you Doing. Thanks a lot.

Check it out on the CNCF page. We're gonna take a break. It looks like they're serving popcorn and cupcakes.

What could be bad? You're watching Textron TV here at Cube Con.