Join us for the 2019 KubeCon Diversity Lunch & Hack

Authors: Kiran Oliver, Podcast Producer, The New Stack

Join us for the 2019 KubeCon Diversity Lunch & Hack: Building Tech Skills & An Inclusive Community - Sponsored by Google Cloud and VMware

Registration for the Diversity Lunch opens today, May 2nd, 2019. To register, go to the main KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU schedule, then log in to your Sched account, and confirm your attendance to the Diversity Lunch. Please sign up ASAP once the link is live, as spaces will fill quickly. We filled the event in just a few days last year, and anticipate doing so again this year.

The 2019 KubeCon Diversity Lunch & Hack will be held at the Fira Gran Via Barcelona Hall 8.0 Room F1 on May 22nd, 2019 from 12:30-14:00.

If you’ve never attended a Diversity Lunch before, not to worry. All are welcome, and there’s a variety of things to experience and discuss.

First things first, let’s establish some ground rules:

This is a safe space. What does that mean? Simple:

1. Asking for and using people’s pronouns
2. Absolutely no photography
3. Awareness of your actions towards others. Do your best to ensure that you contribute towards making this environment welcoming, safe, and inclusive for all.
4. Please avoid tech-heavy arbitrary community slang/jargon [keep in mind that not all of us are developers, many are tech-adjacent and/or new to the community]
5. Act with care and empathy towards your fellow community members at all times.

This event also follows the Code of Conduct for all CNCF events.

We have run a very successful diversity lunch event before. This isn’t a trial run, nor is it a proof of concept. We had a fun, productive, and educational conversation last year in Seattle, and hope to do so again this year. As 2018’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Seattle marked our first Diversity Lunch with pair programming, we hammered out a lot of kinks post-mortem, using that feedback to inform and improve upon our decision making, planning, and organizational process moving forward, to bring you an improved experience at the 2019 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Diversity Lunch.

Tables not related to pair-programming or hands-on Kubernetes will be led by a moderator, where notes and feedback will then be taken and shared at the end of the lunch and in a post-mortem discussion after KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Barcelona ends, as part of our continuous improvement process. Some of last year’s tables were dedicated to topics that were submitted at registration, such as: security, D&I, service meshes, and more. You can suggest your own table topic on the registration form this year as well, and we highly encourage you to do so, particularly if you do not see your preferred topic or activity of choice listed. Your suggestions will then be used to determine the discussion table tracks that will be available at this year’s Diversity Lunch & Hack.

We hope you are also excited to participate in the ‘Hack’ portion of this ‘Lunch and Hack.’ This breakout track will include a variety of peer-programming exercises led by your fellow Kubernetes community members, with discussion leads working together with attendees hands-on to solve their Kubernetes-related problems in a welcoming, safe environment.

To make this all possible, we need you. Yes, you, to register. As much as we love having groups of diverse people all gather in the same room, we also need allies. If you’re a member of a privileged group or majority, you are welcome and encouraged to join us. Most importantly, we want you to take what you learn and experience at the Diversity Lunch back to both your companies and your open source communities, so that you can help us make positive changes not only within our industry, but beyond. No-one lives [or works] in a bubble. We hope that the things you learn here will carry over and bring about positive change in the world as a whole.

We look forward to seeing you!

Special thanks to Leah Petersen, Sarah Conway and Paris Pittman for their help in editing this post.

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