Contribute

Here are a few suggestions on how to get started with the CNCF and the Cloud Native Platform Engineering Community. While you may find it useful to approach each in order, there is no requirement to do so. Find what makes sense to you and jump in!

Research a bit on what topics interest you the most.

Platform Engineering covers a wide area of technical and sociotechnical practices. One of our goals as a community, is to help facilitate contribution across the entire CNCF, including the Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs) and the projects.

Join Slack

Luckily, the CNCF slack isn’t a quiet place, it’s very active and provides a lot of great value. A great thing to start with is by simply introducing yourself in a WG channel and saying what you’re interested in. The leaders of the CNPE Community will point you in the right direction along with others that have contributed.

See what issues are available on GitHub

There’s everything from code-specific issues to documentation issues and everything in-between. Feel free to leave a comment or a suggestion. Here’s the link to the CNPEC repository: https://github.com/Cloud-Native-Platform-Engineering/cnpe-community

Review on-going projects looking for contributors

In some cases there are not formal issues opened or a previous issue continues to have ways to provide ongoing contributions. In this case there may be an entry in the Projects section describing how you can get involved in one of the ongoing initiatives.

Join a meeting

This may seem scary at first, especially if you’re new, but it’s a great way to dive in and see friendly faces after chatting with folks on Slack when you’re more comfortable. The meetings are structured with talking points in a shared google doc. You may be given time to introduce yourself (if you want!) and you are welcome to bring a topic to the meeting.

Contribute a new idea

While there are always a number of ongoing topics in the Community, they all started as new ideas. If you have a new proposal we encourage you to open an issue using the community contribution template and start to build the community of people who would want to work with you on it!

In conclusion, get started your way

Community members come in all styles. Some have never been to a call, others rarely engage on GitHub. The real power in the community is the coming together of different experiences and ideas to generate useful content for the wider cloud native community. You and your experiences are a big part of that, so come join us today!