The K8sPort: Engaging Kubernetes Community One Activity at a Time

Editor's note: Today’s post is by Ryan Quackenbush, Advocacy Programs Manager at Apprenda, showing a new community portal for Kubernetes advocates: the K8sPort.

The K8sPort is a hub designed to help you, the Kubernetes community, earn credit for the hard work you’re putting forth in making this one of the most successful open source projects ever. Back at KubeCon Seattle in November, I presented a lightning talk of a preview of K8sPort.

This hub, and our intentions in helping to drive this initiative in the community, grew out of a desire to help cultivate an engaged community of Kubernetes advocates. This is done through gamification in a community hub full of different activities called “challenges,” which are activities meant to help direct members of the community to attend various events and meetings, share and provide feedback on important content, answer questions posed on sites like Stack Overflow, and more.

By completing these challenges, you collect points and can redeem them for different types of rewards and experiences, examples of which include charitable donations, gift certificates, conference tickets and more. As advocates complete challenges and gain points, they’ll earn performance-related badges, move up in community tiers and participate in a fun community leaderboard.

My presentation at KubeCon, simply put, was a call for early signups. Those who’ve been piloting the program have, for the most part, had positive things to say about their experiences.

I know I'm the only one playing with @K8sPort but it may be the most important thing the #Kubernetes community has.

— Justin Garrison (@rothgar) November 22, 2016

• “Great way of improving the community and documentation. The gamification of Kubernetes gave me more insight into the stack as well.”
  • Jonas Kint, Devops Engineer at Showpad
• _“A great way to engage with the kubernetes project and also help the community. Fun stuff.” _
  • Kevin Duane, Systems Engineer at The Walt Disney Company
• “K8sPort seems like an awesome idea for incentivising giving back to the community in a way that will hopefully cause more valuable help from more people than might usually be helping.”
  • William Stewart, Site Reliability Engineer at Superbalist

Today I am pleased to announce that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is making the K8sPort generally available to the entire contributing community! We’ve simplified the signup process by allowing would-be advocates to authenticate and register through the use of their existing GitHub accounts.

If you’re a contributing member of the Kubernetes community and you have an active GitHub account tied to the Kubernetes repository at GitHub, you can authenticate using your GitHub credentials and gain access to the K8sPort.

Beyond the challenges that get posted regularly, community members will be recognized and compile points for things they’re already doing today. This will be accomplished through the K8sPort’s full integration with GitHub and the core Kubernetes repository. Once you authenticate, you’ll automatically begin earning points and recognition for various contributions -- including logging issues, making pull requests, code commits & more.

If you’re interested in joining the advocacy hub, please join us at k8sport.org! We hope you’re as excited about what you see as we are to continue to build it and present it to you.

For a quick walkthrough on K8sPort authentication and the hub itself, see this quick demo, below.

--Ryan Quackenbush, Advocacy Programs Manager, Apprenda

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