Two months ago, the CNCF launched Open Community Groups (OCG, ocgroups.dev), an online meetup platform that’s open source. This wasn’t a weekend project that happened to ship, it was almost two years in the making before it ever went live.
When we initially thought about migrating to a new platform, we started looking for any open source options that were available. Ultimately, none of them quite fit the way our communities actually work. The answer became clear. Building our own would serve the community better than bending a different option to fit. More than that, we saw it as a foundation; a way to build stronger relationships with the people who fuel open source, through open source.
That’s a bigger commitment than picking a third-party option. But it’s the one we made.
Getting everyone moved over
Over the weekend of May 2nd, we took a snapshot of the existing community platform and migrated our community groups over. A redirect service at community.cncf.io to route traffic depending on whether it was a Cloud Native Community Group [CNCG], a Kubernetes Community Day (KCD), or a virtual event. There were some bumps the first couple days, (Insert the DNS Haiku here), but everything was smoothed out by the end of that week.
The goal isn’t to run two systems side by side forever. KCDs and virtual events stayed where they were (community2.cncf.io), though hosting them here is in the works.
By the numbers
As of writing:
- 289 groups
- 89,202 members
- 6,024 events
- 146,182 attendees
The live count is at ocgroups.dev/stats if you want to see where things stand today.
What’s next
Two priorities. First, hosting KCDs directly on the platform by 2027 so we have a holistic community events platform. Second, tighter integration with the rest of the CNCF ecosystem, so OCG isn’t off on its own island. Think Slack and mailing list integrations. The whole point of building our own was to have that kind of freedom, and now we get to use it.
If you’ve got opinions on where this should go: Issues are welcome. As we’ve said, this is open source. We’re at 68 closed issues and 408 merged PRs We are also located in the CNCF Slack (#open-community-groups)
This was built for the community, and will continue to be improved by the community.