Guest post by KCD Italy Team
KCD Italy 2021 was the first edition of a community-organized non-profit event that took place on November 17th and 18th, and that gathered adopters and technologists from open source and cloud native communities in Italy for education, collaboration, and networking.
The event was fully virtual and free for anyone. We recorded 380 attendees and 260 check-ins, a great engagement rate and very satisfying feedback during and after the event.
The CFP was opened on the 13th of July and closed on the 15th of September.
We received about 90 speech proposals from all over the world and the Technical Committee chose 10 talks, after reviewing 400 review cards, making sure to give room to diverse groups’ representatives, as much as they could. We hoped we would be able to include first-time speakers too, but unfortunately no talk was submitted (should we include a track dedicated to students and newbies next time?).
We are very keen and committed, in line with the CNCF initiatives, in guaranteeing an inclusive environment with the aim of giving even more space to women, non-binary tech people and to all the less represented categories in KCD Italy 2022.
The agenda has been outlined at the beginning of October (here the detailed schedule).
A wide variety of topics was covered: Cloud Native resiliency patterns, policy compliances, the effect of misconfigured Kubernetes , K8s namespaces, Cloud Native environmental sustainability, multi-clusters, Kubernetes Policy as Code, Serverless, Kubernetes Cost Optimization and much much more (all talks will be posted on the KCD YouTube Channel over the next weeks)
We managed to offer half of the talks in Italian, since we wished to be local as much as possible, to comply with the CNCF mission: foster the adoption of Cloud Native wherever possible and support local communities.
Being this edition a fully virtual online event, we weren’t looking for economic sponsorship.
However, companies and organisations were welcomed to help and make the event a great success by providing time and expertise or grand ideas as event partners. And little things lead to great results, very often: donations to an African orphanage were made, a free course specifically designed for KCD attendees was given away, PCs were reconditioned and donated to struggling households. This is what a community does: sharing.
To go back to the two-half days of the event, every talk lasted about 25 minutes and was followed by 10 minutes of Q&A time. Live demos were highly recommended – they are so much interesting to get into!
KCD Italy 2021 was supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and this means that the conference system, the management platform and the overall digital logistics were all set and available to use, reducing part of the organization effort. We used of course Bevy, the CNCF platform, but we managed to integrate it with Streamyard for an easier management of the video streaming that we needed to control on the go (some pre-recorded videos couldn’t be scheduled in advance and screen-sharing wasn’t the best solution).
Taking advantage of this press release, the 2021 Organizer Team shares the wish to grow and take onboard more members for next year’s edition which will presumably be phygital: we all hope that the 2022 KCD Italy edition will be partly held in-person and partly virtual.
In the meantime we’ll held regular MeetUps on the most various Cloud Native topics.
Last thing worth to be highlighted: curious to know more about the logo of KCD Italy? We invite you to read this article on the identity of the event. Enjoy!