Panel Discussion Beginner

Community Infrastructure Matters: Scaling People Like We Scale Platforms

Review Pending

Session Description

Discussion Objectives

Reframe community as engineering infrastructure.
Share proven patterns for scaling contributors rather than depending on heroic individuals.
Explore how open source projects, companies, academia, and nonprofits can collaborate to build sustainable ecosystems.
Encourage attendees to think beyond events and repositories toward long-term ecosystem health.

Key Takeaways

If we can scale platforms to millions of users, why can't we intentionally design systems that scale contributors, maintainers, organizers, and future leaders?

Rather than viewing community as a "soft skill," we'll examine it as infrastructure that requires architecture, automation, governance, observability, documentation, onboarding, succession planning, and continuous improvement.

Participants will leave with:

A framework for treating community as critical infrastructure.
Practical ideas for scaling contributors rather than relying on individuals.
Strategies for creating resilient, inclusive, and sustainable open ecosystems.
Inspiration to invest in people with the same intentionality used for technology.

References

https://youtu.be/LV8-uGgnoG4

Session Categories

Community

Contributing to FOSS

Which track are you applying for?

Main track

Speakers

Rajan Shah Community Builder & Manager, Software Engineering | Red Hat (DevConf India)

Rajan leads the Partner Ecosystem Engineering's Product Certification Solutions team at Red Hat, helping global technology partners build trusted, proven, and secure solutions on Red Hat platforms. His work focuses on strengthening the bridge between community innovation and enterprise reliability — ensuring that certified partner products deliver confidence to customers everywhere.

A community-driven leader, Rajan believes in empowering people through technology, connection, curiosity, and collaboration. He is personally passionate about thought leadership, coaching, mentoring, and nurturing psychologically safe teams where creativity thrives, and performance outperforms.

Outside of work, you’ll find him travelling across the world, exploring new places & culture, capturing moments through his lens, vibing to offbeat music, or sharing good energy with the communities he’s part of.

Eeshaan Sawant Developer Relations | Nextcloud GmbH

Eeshaan is a DevRel Engineer at Nextcloud GmbH. He is an open source fanatic, and you can talk to him about cool things like digital sovereignty, digital autonomy, APIs and Cloud Native. Eeshaan loves to share what he learns, and has given talks at multiple open source conferences across the globe — UbuCon Asia, DevRel Kaigi Japan, Write the Docs Australia, Linux App Summit Europe, ChennaiFOSS; just to name a few.

Don't be surprised if you see Eeshaan carrying his own coffee equipment at a conference. He loves sipping on his "freshly brewed" coffee, and is a hobbyist Home Barista when not by his laptop. ☕️ He also enjoys food and traveling to new countries. 🌎

Rajani Ekunde Senior Software Engineer

Rajani is a DevOps and Senior Software Engineer with over 4 years of experience in cloud infrastructure, automation, and platform engineering. She is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for Google Cloud, a Docker Captain, and a Women Techmakers (WTM) Ambassador, actively contributing to the global tech community.

Rajani is a frequent speaker at major cloud and DevOps conferences, where she shares practical insights on modern infrastructure and emerging technologies. Passionate about knowledge sharing, Rajani aims to inspire and empower developers to build scalable, reliable systems.

Ram Iyengar Chief Evangelist | Cloud Foundry Foundation

Ram Iyengar is an engineer by practice and an educator at heart. He was (cf) pushed into technology evangelism along his journey as a developer and hasn’t looked back since! He enjoys helping engineering teams around the world discover new and creative ways to work. He is a proponent of community-first product development.

Neel Shah Developer Advocate | StackGen

Neel help platform engineers and DevOps teams understand and adopt cloud-native infrastructure through talks, demos, and community building. He organise the CNCF Gandhinagar, HashiCorp UG Gandhinagar, and Google Cloud Gandhinagar communities, and he have spoken at 40+ events, including KubeCon India, PlatformCon, HashiTalks, OpenSearchCon Korea, FOSS ASIA, and LinuxFest Northwest.

His core focus areas are Kubernetes, GitOps, IaC with Terraform/Vault, AI-powered DevOps tooling, and observability pipelines. He’ve mentored 15+ hackathons and open-source programmes.