KCD Taiwan 2023 Recap

Kubernetes Community Days Taiwan was launched by the Cloud Native Taiwan User Groups and backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The event was held on July 29 and 30 as a segment under COSCUP.

Cloud Native technologies serve as the foundation of modern Infrastructure. In Taiwan, although the utilization of related software is high, there is a lack of active sharing of use cases and emerging technologies. Through the Kubernetes Community Days Taiwan, we aspire to inspire people to share their use cases, latest features upstream, and development narratives, thus promoting Cloud Native technologies locally.

Presentations

Over the span of two days, We received approximately 30 Call for Papers (CFP) submissions, and a total of 16 presentations covered various aspects of Cloud Native technologies. Aside from local speakers, we also invited international speakers from South Korea, Hong Kong, India and Belgium to provide further insights into the development and use cases overseas.

Some of the notable presentations included Experiences of Using Kubernetes in Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs. The speakers shared intriguing details of how Kubernetes is used within Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs which was particularly appealing to the attendees given that governments are often viewed as being slow to adopt new technologies.

Another captivating presentation by Kevin Dubois from Belgium, titled Tekton and ArgoCD: The Dynamic Duo for Kube Native CI/CD offered listeners a live demonstration on Cloud Native CI/CD deployment involving an intriguing phone game for audience participation.

We are also attempting to reduce language barriers by utilizing Teams' real-time translation feature. For all English sessions, we provide instant English-to-Chinese subtitles, and for Chinese sessions, we offer real-time Chinese-to-English subtitles. We hope that through this approach, all participants will not feel hindered by language barriers and can actively engage in learning from each other's experiences and sharing.

Booth

In addition to the session tracks, we also set up a booth to introduce our community to the attendees of COSCUP. At our booth, we engaged visitors in interactive games and rewarded participants with stickers. These games involved identifying CNCF graduated projects by their logo, spelling out abbreviations associated with Cloud Native technologies, and guessing the unrelated Kubernetes project from a list that ranged from k0s to k9s.

Collaboration across 3 countries

Except for Phil Huang, who is based in Taiwanm, Hoon Jo - one of CNCF Ambassador from Megazone Corp in South Korea, and Ching Kuo from Mirantis in Japan, who traveled a long way to help me with the Kubernetes Community Days Taiwan 2023 event.

Areas for Improvement

While the event was highly successful, there are still several areas where we can make improvements.

1. Event Check-ins

As we operate as a track session under COSCUP, it's challenging to track the total number of attendees for both the event and each session, as the main event does not require sign up. Although we encourage individuals to RSVP on the KCD website, the number of RSVPs significantly deviates from the number of actual attendees.

2. Pre Event Mareketing

Due to the fact that the community volunteers are not specialized in marketing in terms of number and expertise, we did not do a very good job of marketing before the conference.

3. Budget Control

Since we have to pay for many international speakers' individual tickets and hotel expenses, which is a great burden on the non-profit community, we need to improve our future sponsorship recruitment program and better manage our budget plan.

Key Figures

• Total number of submissions: 30
• Total number of submissions accepted: 16
• Submission Acceptance rate (= Accepted/All Submissions): 53.3%
• Total number of CNCF/Apache/OpenInfra related projects: 14, includes WASM / Kong / Apache APISIX / Kubernetes / kwok / m9sweeper / ArgoCD / Atmosphere / Grafana / Tekton / Longhorn / Cloud Native Glossary / kuttl / Prometheus
• Total number of nationalities: 5, includes Belgium / South Korea / Hong Kong / Taiwan / India
• Total registered versus total checked in: 136 for total registered, and around 107 for checked in. The classroom can accommodate a Max. of 120 seats.
• Check-in rate (=Checked in / Registered): 78.6%
• Total speakers with non-male speaker percentage: N/A. We have adopted a vetting strategy that looks only at the topic and content of the speakers, with no additional scrutiny of the identity of the speakers, so there is no screening of non-male questions. However, we are prepared to increase the publicity of the call for submissions. We hope that more genders, identities and nationalities will participate.