CNCF, mistakes and the Brazilian situation
Ricardo Katz
Hi sc friends, hope you all are fine.
Note: before reading this email, bare in mind that I am upset, sad and feeling disrespected by CNCF. There may be some emotion on the words, but I don’t want by no mean to be disrespectful with anyone. Also English is not my main language, so words may not represent correctly what I want to say. Also, please try to wear my shoes and get my context. I am not asking any action on this email. I want to expose a situation between me, a community member and CNCF, that made me question how much I “exist” and am still welcome to participate on Kubernetes org.
As you may know, I am Brazilian. Opposite to the majority of our population, I’ve always had a privileged position during my youth. I could study. I had computers. I always had food on my table. I have learned English. I have grown on the biggest city here, and got more opportunities than people living on some of the 5000 other cities in this country. I am probably the 3% privileged here. But this never made me close my eyes to where I came from, and how I could help others less privileged that I am.
During the last years, one of my goals was to get more Brazilians contributing to opensource and specifically Kubernetes, as this is a very diverse and inclusive community. I cannot say this effort has been a huge success, but at least every single person (brazilian or not) I get to do one contribution to code, docs, translations, I have at least a feeling that I could help another one to get started and start walking by their own. In fact we had a growth on Brazilians on last year on docs, code, etc (besides the other Brazilians that has always been around but never mentioned it).
As I said, English is not our language and we don’t learn it on schools (unless you are privileged, as I was) and because of this, we understood that, even English being required for IT jobs, it would be helpful to have docs translated. People can use it for certifications! People can get better context on their main language. The folks working on this area with sig-docs are doing a great job on it, on their volunteer time (as the majority of us). And some of this persons also allocated some time to participate on CNCF glossary.
Given all this context, I would like to explain that this week we had an incident. During Kubecon keynote, there was a presentation on all the translations of CNCF glossary. 9 were mentioned (one wasn’t on slides, but has been released this week) and for my surprise, Brazilian Portuguese, which is ready since January has been left out of slides and not even mentioned.
Now, at this moment I beg you: put yourself on my shoes, and imagine that, after trying to get more people from your country, with all the difficulties, to contribute, this happens on the major IT event, on a keynote for 10k people. It gots the contributors demotivated. It got me, that has nothing to do with CNCF glossary, with a huge sense of injustice. It made a huge harm for our community, as this people, on a volunteer contribution for CNCF, simply didn’t existed at the keynote time. It throws all the inclusivity efforts on a trash can.
I have then started to look for PROPORTIONAL RESPONSE for this incident (and not for someone to blame, as opposite to some people thinking someone should be blamed or they should assume blame). I have publicly asked CNCF for a position (I have used some irony, as I was really upset), which has been answered as “we did a mistake, please reach us on DM to discuss”. And a following tweet on their official account, saying “there are 10 and not 8 languages”.
So far, I may be over reacting for you, but given context, place and people, is this the proportional answer for this kind of incident? Being us an inclusive community, is the right answer to “forgetting contributors of a country on a keynote” tweeting with “oops, sorry?”.
I doubt the same lazy response would be made on some other situation involving different diversity groups.
That said, and given the feeling of “we don’t care, you are not worth of a better response” from CNCF, I am now with the feeling “do Brazilians belong to this community? Do we exist for CNCF? How can I get people engaged to contribute after this kind of incident and position?”
I have already heard multiple feedbacks from Brazilians on how upset they got by this, how once more LATAM is not important for this community and how they are rethinking on contribute. And honestly, me included. I am still thinking if I should keep spending my weekends doing stuff, trying to help others to onboard contributing. I love this community, I got where I am today, professionally and personally happy, due to people of this community helping me. But this situation just sucks, in a way that I don’t want to close my eyes for it and pretend it never happened. I owe my local community a better response.
All of that said, I would like to inform you that, as an org member, I am going to be away from the community and some projects that I help to maintain for some time, slowing down my pace while I think if I should step down of all my responsibilities and org membership.
I hope we can also understand that the path for some contributors to getting where they are now is much much harder than for others from this community, due to language, opportunities and other geo localization reasons and that while a small “mistake” seems nothing to some, for people like Brazilians, may represent that the hard path we had to be here simply doesn’t matter.
Thank you, thanks for everything this community provides and the love to its contributors, I hope that this kind of “mistake” stops happening that much.
Christoph Blecker
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