Building a Community: How Cortex Went from a Vendor Project to a Community

The presentation discusses strategies for promoting and improving adoption of open source projects through continuous blogging, conference talks, meetups, working closely with users, and creating case studies.

• Continuous blogging is important for improving visibility and discoverability of open source projects through search engines
• Conference talks and meetups can provide early adopters and useful feedback
• Creating a simple introduction slide deck can empower the community to give talks about the project
• Working closely with a few users can provide insight and help improve the project
• Case studies can be useful for showcasing the benefits of the project to potential users
• An anecdote is provided about working closely with a user from Gojek to improve adoption of Cortex

The speaker worked closely with a team from Gojek to improve adoption of Cortex, visiting their office and improving documentation and configs to fix issues at scale. This collaboration led to a strong friendship with one of the team members who later moved to Berlin.

In 2018, Cortex was largely vendor-driven, and almost no one other than maintainers could run it. Its docs were lacking; you had to read the code instead. While that might be acceptable for a new project, it's not for wide adoption. Over the last few years, since joining the CNCF, we have put a focus on building a vibrant community. It was a long and arduous journey, but we're very happy with the healthy community we have today, with maintainers from 5 different companies and a 5x increase in activity on the Cortex Slack and GitHub! While our _public_ adopters document lists more than 15 companies, with several providing Cortex as a service, we have a lot more companies running it, from international banks and Fortune 50 enterprises to small startups. In this talk, we will walk through the key changes we made and how our philosophy on community-building helped us thrive and led to fruitful collaboration with sibling projects Thanos and Prometheus.