How Do We Cultivate the End User Community Within Cloud-Native Projects?

Open source projects often face challenges with aligning incentives between developers, contributors, and end users, especially when projects are maintained by unpaid solo developers or involve larger corporate participation. While some attempts, like Tidelift and GitHub Sponsors, aim to bridge this gap, there are still notable discrepancies, particularly in cloud-native projects. Corporate-backed initiatives often see contributions on employer-paid time, with large tech companies and smaller developer-centric businesses benefiting most from cloud-native technologies. However, to broaden adoption and address misaligned incentives, projects like OpenTelemetry have initiated end-user engagement strategies, such as community surveys and monthly discussions, to gather feedback and improve project implementation. These engagements have helped generate valuable insights and incremental improvements, though challenges remain in effectively routing feedback and addressing non-code contributions. Efforts to enhance community involvement and education, through speaker series and demo developments, have shown promise in moving adoption beyond early adopters. Organizations are encouraged to map out stakeholders and align goals to foster inclusive participation and drive project growth, emphasizing lightweight experimentation and identifying under-represented contributors.