Keynote: How to Become an Open Source Mechanic

The presentation discusses the challenges of sustaining progress in cloud native projects and the importance of balancing contributions to projects versus usage. It emphasizes the need for a community to support maintainers and contributors, and provides tips on how to become an open source mechanic.

• The proportion of contribution to usage of cloud native projects is not sustainable
• Balancing contributions to projects versus usage is unique to each project and community
• An onslaught of help and feature requests can lead to missing engagements and less contributions
• Maintainers getting burned out can lead to project crisis
• A community is needed to support maintainers and contributors
• Tips on becoming an open source mechanic include checking the contributing file and readme, using labels for issues and PRs, and providing constructive feedback

The speaker shares her experience as a hobby mechanic and relates it to the challenges of a cloud native road trip. She emphasizes the importance of planning and preparation, bringing friends along, and not being the only one doing the work. She also highlights the need to account for unpredictable events like potholes and flat tires, and the importance of infrastructure and support along the way.

As our cloud native family expands and matures, we often learn that we may need a vehicle to sustain our progress. The idea of our project or group crawled along until we gave it legs to walk and run. But we need them to go farther. So we need a vehicle to make that happen, and we’ll need to understand the basic mechanics of successful projects in order to become a mechanic of our vehicle. In this session, Emily shares her common learnings from engaging multiple projects, groups, and foundations that can assist our cloud native community, maintainers, contributors, and new comers on becoming great open source mechanics to build our vehicles for the road ahead.