ContribEx GSuite Proposal

[Paris Pittman]

Hi Steering - (cc'ing contribex for records)

Should this be a KEP? I went back and forth on it and decided to send this first. 

This will greatly help with streamlining operations of the project, specifically this SIG and how we communicate to 20k+ people. I purposefully left out as much administration detail as possible but some of it had to stay in to keep context. Please let me know if any of this is unclear on how we would use it or why. 

-paris

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Paris Pittman Kubernetes Community Open Source Strategy, Google Cloud 345 Spear Street, San Francisco, 94105

[Brian Grant]

I don't think it needs to be a KEP.

Are there any reasons why we shouldn't do it?

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[Dan Kohn]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 9:31 AM 'Brian Grant' via steering <stee...@kubernetes.io> wrote:

I don't think it needs to be a KEP.

 

Are there any reasons why we shouldn't do it?

I would suggest that Survey Monkey or similar is a better option for surveys than Google Forms because it is accessible in China without using a VPN. But, that is a detail and doesn't detract from the underlying value of having a GSuite account for other purposes.

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[Michelle Noorali]

Hey Paris,

• We're seeing more interest from people China wanting to participate in the community. Is gsuite blocked in China? If so, is there an alternative service that would give us the ability to attain the goals you described in the proposal? Have alternatives been researched and discussed?
• Will people have to log in with a gmail account to access the docs/mailing list/etc? I didn't realize how big of a pain this was until Deis was acquired by Microsoft and I ended up using my personal email for Kubernetes related tasks. Creating a gmail, using personal email for work or even a google account to access services is a blocker for many. With diversity and inclusivity being a big topic in the community, I'd like to make sure we're doing all the research possible before making this decision. Please let me know where/if I can help.

Thanks

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[Brian Grant]

Please ask people from China who encounter difficulties to reach out to SIG Contributor Experience directly. All of the concerns about access from China I hear are from people who aren't in China. It would be useful to get first-hand input from the people who are potentially impacted about the difficulties.

[Dan Kohn]

• We're seeing more interest from people China wanting to participate in the community. Is gsuite blocked in China? If so, is there an alternative service that would give us the ability to attain the goals you described in the proposal? Have alternatives been researched and discussed?

We tested this with CNCF's rep in Beijing last year. She can send and receive mail fine from Google Groups. However, she can't access the website for archives and search.

[ih...@cncf.io]

> Will people have to log in with a gmail account to access the docs/mailing list/etc

It depends on the access permissions to the artifacts themselves (docs, mailing lists, calendar etc.).

> I didn't realize how big of a pain this was until Deis was acquired by Microsoft and I ended up using my personal email for Kubernetes related tasks. Creating a gmail, using personal email for work or even a google account to access services is a blocker for many. 

If it is possible, can you please give us some samples of the possible issues?

[Michelle Noorali]

We're not hearing from people in China because they're the ones who have difficulty with accessing Google Groups and services. Through my interactions with leaders from China on the Governing Board of the CNCF, my previous experience organizing SIG Apps and chairing KubeCon, and after attending LinuxCon China in June, I've become more aware of how much and how intensely developers in China would like to be part of the Kubernetes community.

Dan - I think we could use some help gathering more information around the concerns from devs in China by leveraging your and Linux Foundation's experience here. Is there a survey we can do? How have you all gathered information from people in China in the past?

Paris - I'm not trying to be a blocker. I think your proposal makes a lot of sense and would definitely help make communicating better and easier. I do want to use this as an opportunity to ensure we're being inclusive though. I'll ping you on slack later this afternoon. If you're available to chat, I'd like to know how I can be of help here.

[Paris Pittman]

We have definitely done our research with China and I neglected to put that on the doc. I will update with our tldr. We also researched many other avenues and will also include on the doc. It appears that we will need to move to services like tencent docs, whatsapp, and the list serves that cncf has created. We would need to set up some kind of mirrored service (aka have a china contribex) or move all of our infra there. We are still testing hackmd.io as an alternative to google docs but hearing mixed results from folks in China but will get a better pulse on this soon and get back to you. 

If we wanted to pair this down and just talk about the basics, we direly need an email account that we can do bulk/mass emails with and properly email triage issues that come in because the googlegroup is not scaling at all and holding us down. I sent a lot of the bulk/mass email now because we've had incidents of contributors helping out and then the email goes to folks spam. As I mentioned in the doc, there is a lot of administration detail here and trying to keep this as high level as possible so it's not derailing or bikeshedding.  

To Dans point - we have all intentions of using surveymonkey go forward and not google forms. Ihor got us access to an account that we can use to collaborate. I will also note that in the doc. 

We are also open to other suggestions of tooling if folks have it. This isn't an end to the feedback loop. We've been working on this and the inventory of our comms channels for roughly 6 months. If we were to migrate or mirror as mentioned above, we are looking at least another 6 months to a year. 

[Brian Grant]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 8:33 AM Michelle Noorali <michelle...@gmail.com> wrote:

We're not hearing from people in China because they're the ones who have difficulty with accessing Google Groups and services.

I have not heard that sending email or joining zoom meetings are blocked at a technical level. Time zone and language barriers have been the bigger challenges AIUI. 

[Dan Kohn]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 11:33 AM Michelle Noorali <michelle...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dan - I think we could use some help gathering more information around the concerns from devs in China by leveraging your and Linux Foundation's experience here. Is there a survey we can do? How have you all gathered information from people in China in the past?

In my experience, nearly 100% of developers in China have access to a VPN if they work with a Western company, a major Chinese company, or a VC-funded startup. However, I believe there are a large number of developers at smaller companies who do not have easy access to a VPN. I think we are just beginning to reach that next tier through holding KubeCon in China, CNCF's official WeChat channel, and mirroring kubernetes.io to kubernetes.cn, which is inside the Great Firewall.

My viewpoint is anecdote, but I'm hesitant to run a survey on the subject because using a VPN to access a foreign site is now illegal in China, and I don't ask Chinese developers to confirm that they are doing something illegal: https://www.ft.com/content/dda957be-1256-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

I'm happy to continue working with ContribEx and the Chinese translation team on optimizing tooling.

[Brian Grant]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 9:15 AM Paris Pittman <parisp...@google.com> wrote:

We have definitely done our research with China and I neglected to put that on the doc. I will update with our tldr. We also researched many other avenues and will also include on the doc. It appears that we will need to move to services like tencent docs, whatsapp, and the list serves that cncf has created.

Before we change email services, we should explore alternatives. The one currently used by CNCF is not awesome (e.g., does it really not support threads?). We'd also need another group-based authorization mechanism for things like docs.

[Dan Kohn]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 12:25 PM Brian Grant <brian...@google.com> wrote:

Before we change email services, we should explore alternatives. The one currently used by CNCF is not awesome (e.g., does it really not support threads?). We'd also need another group-based authorization mechanism for things like docs.

CNCF email is hosted via groups.io and does support threads (called topics). E.g.: https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-toc/topics

However, I'm not advocating for moving Kubernetes lists there because I'm worried our SaaS provider would provide a worse SLA than Google Groups.

[Brian Grant]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 9:32 AM Dan Kohn <d...@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 12:25 PM Brian Grant <brian...@google.com> wrote:

Before we change email services, we should explore alternatives. The one currently used by CNCF is not awesome (e.g., does it really not support threads?). We'd also need another group-based authorization mechanism for things like docs.

CNCF email is hosted via groups.io and does support threads (called topics). E.g.: https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-toc/topics

Is there a way to group search results by topic?

https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-k8s-conformance/search?q=windows+profile

 

However, I'm not advocating for moving Kubernetes lists there because I'm worried our SaaS provider would provide a worse SLA than Google Groups.

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Dan Kohn <d...@linuxfoundation.org>

Executive Director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation https://www.cncf.io

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[Brian Grant]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 9:36 AM Brian Grant <brian...@google.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 9:32 AM Dan Kohn <d...@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 12:25 PM Brian Grant <brian...@google.com> wrote:

Before we change email services, we should explore alternatives. The one currently used by CNCF is not awesome (e.g., does it really not support threads?). We'd also need another group-based authorization mechanism for things like docs.

CNCF email is hosted via groups.io and does support threads (called topics). E.g.: https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-toc/topics

Is there a way to group search results by topic?

https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-k8s-conformance/search?q=windows+profile

Nevermind. Found it. 

https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-k8s-conformance/search?ev=false&q=windows+profile&ct=1 

[Dan Kohn]

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 12:20 PM Brian Grant <brian...@google.com> wrote:

I have not heard that sending email or joining zoom meetings are blocked at a technical level. 

Zoom works reliably in China and CNCF's tests from Beijing show that you can send and receive to Google Groups. The issue is that the Google Groups website is blocked for subscription and searching the archives.

Time zone and language barriers have been the bigger challenges AIUI. 

This is almost certainly the bigger issue.

[Jorge Castro]

On Wed, 2019-01-09 at 10:54 -0500, Michelle Noorali wrote:
> Hey Paris,
> We're seeing more interest from people China wanting to participate
> in the community. Is gsuite blocked in China? If so, is there an
> alternative service that would give us the ability to attain the
> goals you described in the proposal? Have alternatives been
> researched and discussed?

I need to add this to the document but wanted but we did a
communications assessment last year, let me just sum up the results:

- All hosted solutions that meet our needs will inevitably run into the
same problem, so even though it's Google today there's no guarantee if
we move to anything else that we won't have the same problem.

- Smaller services might not be blocked in China but would add more
friction across the project because it's one more account for everyone.
So if we decided, let's use dropbox or hackmd for files, then we'd
still need something else for a calendar, etc.

- Some projects like Openstack solved this by running a bunch of their
own infrastructure. This comes with it's own set of big city problems
that we probably don't want to deal with. I am only bringing this up
for completeness, I am in no way advocating that we do this. :D

> Creating a gmail, using personal email for work or even a google
> account to access services is a blocker for many.

This is also a problem for companies that have paid Gsuites, as they
might have a company policy in place that makes sharing restrictive.

> With diversity and inclusivity being a big topic in the community,
> I'd like to make sure we're doing all the research possible before
> making this decision.

I think we should break this down into two areas.

A gsuite for the org would be used by Contributor Experience would help
us run things like summits, elections, and other administrative tasks
like the calendar. This would be run by the usual OWNERS from
contributor experience. The community calendar would have a different
owner, and contributors would get emails from
elec...@kubernetes.io or whatever and that would all work. There's no
need for an end-user or developer to access those properties unless
they were working as part of contribex.

The second bit the the tough one, which is access to all our archives
and communications channels from China. The gsuite we're asking for
neither helps nor hinders us in that regard.

We're also kind of spoiled that we can use the existing google groups
structure as ACLs for our documents, which is really nice and something
I haven't been able to reproduce with any other combination of tools.

I don't really have a solution for the second problem. At this point
we've tried just about every combination of tools and each one would
end up with similar restrictions on top of the pain of switching.

Built in collaborative editing native in github using our group
permissions would go a long way to helping us here, then we could just
do all our gdoc-like work there. We can sort of do this today with
hackmd.io but I wouldn't propose it as a long term solution.

[Chris Short]

Alright. This thread is bugging me a little bit so I'm going to chime in. Let me preface this by saying my intentions are to help frame the political reality is US/China relations for others that might not be aware. I'm going to miss a lot of the nitty-gritty details though because of the enormity of it all. Also, I will over-generalize because I'm focusing on geopolitical issues (I know the average non-party member in China is as much like me as the Red Hat Solutions Architect that lives across town from me).

1) The Chinese government has little interest in being collaborative outside of China. Unless it directly benefits China as measured against CCP priorities it's going to be a near vertical uphill climb. Sorry to be blunt but, that's been the reality of the situation for a while (although showing signs of softening). I'm hopeful it changes as Chinese influence beyond Asia expands and the Party learns that goodwill often goes as far a good work does. Fingers crossed here.

2) The laws are written in a way that basically makes data sharing and collaboration directly from anything outside of China difficult without breaking a law (as Dan noted). If you want to hear more about how hard it is to do business in China, Cloudflare wrote a fantastic post in 2015 about the work they did getting into the country: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-extended-cloudflares-performance-and-security-into-mainland-china/

3) China presents the best of challenges for the world and China itself. I'm beyond excited about getting more involved in the region. But, the reality of the economic and political situation is a thing. We are going to have to manage our expectations on this one as far as availability, SLA, etc. Side note: there are some political and intelligence analysts seeing signs of a potential splitting of the Internet between China's sphere of influence and US/EU spheres of influence. This poses even larger issues for the world at large.

4) Aside from mirroring to services based in China, the likelihood of landing on a great solution today is very low. At this point, the focus should be more towards iterating our way into a better experience for our Chinese friends while still doing business with a solution that fits a majority need now.

With all that being said, our responsibility is to be open, inviting, and collaborative. But, we are not capable of changing the way China works at the moment. Yes, we need a solution. But, without significant, on-going effort from both sides of the Pacific, we're going to be hard-pressed to land on one.

I'm done rambling now and I'm overdue for painkillers.

Thanks!

Chris Short

Web | Newsletter | Twitter

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[Michelle Noorali]

Paris and Jorge - Thanks so much for the background/research context. It really clears up lots of questions for me. +1 from me on the gsuite proposal.

Chris - I agree with you. I appreciate this conversation because it brings into public context the kinds of solutions we have looked at and evaluated for Chinese developers as well as where the blockers are.

[Paris Pittman]

Sorry I'm just switching back to this context from a bit ago, do any other SC members want to weigh in or object use testing this out? (thx michelle for your advocacy) We will ask CNCF to proceed if this is cool with everyone. 

The three main things we need immediately: a gmail function, team drive so we can store our data/moderation screenshots from banning people/images from events/stuff that can't go into github, and a moder...@kubernetes.io googlegroup owned under the domain (this is the real urgency so we can pull all of our mods under one roof). 

We are going to look for a localization individual who can help us spread the contribex word on the ground in the APAC region. We've been having APAC friendly 8pm PT ContribEx meetings one week a month for the last three and they were all low attended with APAC folks but have 10-15 show from US based timezones (lol). I don't think we are hitting their advertising markets and really want someone there to help run these. 

[Brian Grant]

I am in favor. It seems like a useful incremental step forward.

[Davanum Srinivas]

+1 from me. Let's move ahead

Thanks,

Dims

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[Phillip Wittrock]

+1

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[Michelle Noorali]

+1 from me 

[Brandon Philips]

Paris- Do you need help from Joe, Aaron, or I now? https://github.com/kubernetes/steering#top-level-accounts

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