Asia Pacific friendly SIGs

[codefromthecrypt]

At the moment, Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings follow norms of north america and europe with regards to meeting times and when to schedule meetings (e.g. avoiding US holidays). The usually morning california time meeting times result in a difficult position for contributors in APAC.

For example, while UTC+8 has 21pct of the world population, most SIG meetings begin 11pm or midnight. There have been ad-hoc attempts to cater to the timezone, which at least once rolled back into a second/review session of the existing time slot, then canceled due to lack of participation.

If we want to solve this, we need to solve the underlying issues and try a different way. We've already tried secondary meetings and know that doesn't work. There's some interest in a 3 timezone proposal in the collector SIG, and it is understood not all SIG will be large enough to accommodate APAC. Let's focus on larger SIGs at first. The collector and java SIGS seem willing and large enough to try again.

There are a few suggestions I have in this process, and but open the floor to suggestions or criticisms:

1. UTC+8 to be able to attend in normal working hours, not earlier than 8am.
2. Meetings are not relegated to review sessions of decisions made in other timezones.
3. Maintainers in western north america support this by primarily bringing discussion to the APAC friendly meeting.
4. Evaluation of success is not made prematurely (e.g. canceled less than 6 months in).

The summary sentiment is let's make sure we do not reinforce secondary status of this large population and consider it a failure of the group if we fail at this. When we have active and equals participation from APAC, my hope is that our efforts will prove themselves worthwhile. Meanwhile, I hope you can agree that even if we fail, it is worth trying again.

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collector sig issue java sig discussion

[codefromthecrypt]

An anecdote I noticed is kubeday japan currently has no session on otel, nor an obvious event around the timing, even unofficial. This is despite some really cool leads like @ymtdzzz https://github.com/ymtdzzz/otel-tui and some community driven events recently like https://mackerelio.connpass.com/event/311216/. This particular anecdote is solveable as there is time to arrange such a thing.

And to be clear, I'm not saying we aren't doing anything. We have good coverage at KubeCon China. My intent is to consider the social aspects of who are in the areas currently underserved, and how we can bring folks together whichever ways we can.

For example, having a SIG meeting near the timing of an event is a good way to warm connections in ways that may already exist in other parts of the world for years.

My 2p

[svrnm]

Note, that this is something the SIG Contributor Experience can look into

[jpkrohling]

This is "deciding", as we are trialing this with a few SIGs and gathering the experience from that before making a broader guideline/recommendation.