Opening night of Web Summit 2021, at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Sam Barnes/Web Summit

Global in-person events were back in a big way at the start of November (1-4) in Lisbon, Portugal, with Web Summit 2021 gathering more than 42,000 attendees from 128 countries. I was there to discover Internet trends and meet interesting people. What I saw was the contagious excitement of people from all corners of the world coming together for what seemed like a type of normality in a time when the Internet “is almost as important as having water”, according to Sonia Jorge from the World Wide Web Foundation.

Here’s some of what I heard in the halls.

With a lot happening on a screen, the lockdowns throughout the pandemic showed us a glimpse of what the metaverse could be, just without VR or AR headsets. Think about the way many were able to use virtual tools to work all day, learn, collaborate, order food, supplies, and communicate with friends and family — all from their homes.

While many had this experience, many others were unable to, with some talks at the event focusing on the digital divide and how “Internet access is a basic human right”, according to the grandson of Nelson Mandela — we interviewed him, and you can watch the conversation below.

The future already has some paths laid out, and many were discussed at the event.

The pandemic helped to accelerate most of them, especially by bringing more people (in some countries) to the digital world.

The CPO of Meta, Chris Cox, shared how the company previously known as Facebook has some ideas about the future of augmented reality, and how they want to see those ideas play out in the next five to 10 years. “We want to get the conversation going,” he said.

Also present at the event was Jon Vlassopulos, Global Head of Music, Roblox. He explained how virtual concerts on the video game platform could be the future of music performances, and even bring free tickets to fans of famous music stars like Adele. Stars like Zara Larsson, KSI and Ava Max have already performed on Roblox and “they’re making big money from selling digital merchandise”.

On the other hand, Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit, says that there’s something magical about in-person big events that can’t be replicated in full online events. However, the real and virtual world can complement each other — it was announced that CES 2022 will use a combination of Web Summit online and offline software.

Web3 was another big part of the discussion, sometimes in clear sight, other times embedded in the many conversations about blockchain, NFTs and cryptocurrencies, and as a vision for a decentralized web (we’re actually working on that).

Speakers also focused on data privacy and security, ethics in AI and data protection. Ownership to the user and sovereignty were topics discussed and emphasized by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the last day of the event.

The workplace was also a popular topic, as well as the changes it underwent in the past couple of years. We heard about the importance of diversity in the workplace, as well as the future of work — is it going to be flexible, hybrid, full remote or something in between? Speakers also mentioned The Great Resignation and the reset of people’s and organizations’ mindsets.

Using AI to hire and motivate people was also in the air, as well as big topics like the digitalization of healthcare, mental health, behaviour changes in humans (young and adult) who are more and more on the Internet and even the decentralization of financial services.

And here are some examples of the different speakers at the event we talked to:

Portuguese Navy officer and coordinator of the Task Force for the Portugal COVID-19 vaccination plan

Portugal has achieved an 86% vaccination rate on the vice-admiral’s watch. He brought a sense of mission to a task that involved organization, focus and the use of both digital and communication tools.

The country started the vaccination process late but is now one of the countries with a higher vaccination rate in the world. We talked with the vice-admiral about how the Internet helped, but also how it created problems related to disinformation and misinformation, and we asked about the dangers of controlling speech online. Finally, we asked for bits of leadership advice.

Executive Director World Wide Web Foundation (Alliance for Affordable Internet)

“The Internet is now an essential public good that everybody needs at this time just like we need to drink water or to have electricity and shelter. We should do more to bring everyone into the digital society.”

In some countries around the world Internet access is very limited. In some places people have to go to a particular plaza to have access to the Internet — five years ago John Graham-Cumming saw something similar in Cuba. Sonia Jorge knows that very well. She is trying to bring affordable Internet to everyone and that challenge is more difficult than it appears.

She explains that the world is far behind in the UN’s goals for Internet access — today only about half of the earth’s population has any Internet access at all. But many of those who have access to the World Wide Web have limited possibilities to be online: “some have access once a month, for example.” So the digital divide is real, and it “should worry everyone”.

The pandemic caused health and economic difficulties that didn’t help the mission of bringing good, fast and reliable Internet to everyone. Nevertheless, Sonia — who is Portuguese and moved to the US to study when she was 17 — saw that many African countries like Nigeria began to realize that the Internet is really important for knowledge and also for the possibilities it opens in terms of cultural, financial and societal growth.

Sonia also highlights that there is a big disparity in the world between men and women in terms of Internet access.

Editorial director of MIT Sloan Management Review

Technology will play a significant role in the future of work. In a way, that “future” is already here, but isn’t evenly distributed — and researchers are just beginning to study it. David Kiron goes on to explain the challenge for some people to be “really seen by their leadership when you’re not in the office.”

The former senior researcher at Harvard Business School tells us how companies started valuing employees even more through the pandemic. There’s also an opportunity for different ways of work interaction through digital tools — “Zoom calls aren’t it.” He’s also worried that the pandemic caused a great reset that is driving many out of the workforce entirely: “There’s a trend of working moms opting out,” for example.

About the metaverse and a universe of universes: “If tech leaders spent more time reading philosophy they might have a better sense of where the world is going (...) more and more leaders of companies are taking on the philosopher's role.”

And how can AI help? “Once you get AI going in a company we saw in our new study that there’s a big bump in morale, collaboration, learning and people’s sense on what they should be doing”. AI can also help better identify talent and match candidates to skills that are already represented in a company, but he also highlights that “humans play a role in all the stages of the hiring and working process.”

David Kiron explains that “if you’re not asking the right questions to your AI teams you’re going to be behind other companies that are doing better questions”. He adds that AI can help with performance, but it also helps “redefine what performance means in your organization by finding other metrics to look at.”

Co-founder and CEO of neuroscience-based medical device company Neuroelectrics

We talked to Ana about the future of the Internet. She thinks moving forward there will be more fluid interfaces — not only limited to computers and smartphones, but we will have different devices that go beyond VR headsets and that will lead to new types of interactions. In the neuroscience field, she has big hopes in the technology that Neuroelectrics, her company, is developing in Barcelona, Spain. They work with devices that use non-invasive transcranial electrical stimulation to treat the brain in diseases like epilepsy, depression and Alzheimer.

Neuroelectrics is also developing a process called digital copy (for better personalized treatments) that could be useful in the future if someone develops one of these problems. But she says humankind is still very far from the dangers of something like a mind-reading device or the possibility of reading and downloading thoughts and dreams: “it’s fun to think of science fiction possibilities, but we need to act now on things and problems that are affecting us today.”

She also talks about the difficulties of being a woman in the tech business and raising money. “But little by little I see more women and that’s why it’s important to get out there and explain to women that they can do it.”

Director for Africa Journalists for Human Rights

The grandson of Nelson Mandela is on a mission to help journalists in Africa to be free to publish human rights stories. He explains how the Internet is critical for this mission and “a human rights issue”. Not only does the Internet give communities access to trustworthy information, but it also helps them become aware of their rights, gives access to financial tools and allows them to grow in our era.

He also highlights how the Internet can be misused, for example when it becomes a vehicle for misinformation, or when governments shut down Internet access to control communities — in Sudan the Internet has been cut off since October 25, 2021 (you can track that information on Cloudflare Radar).

Newly elected Mayor of Lisbon; previous European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation

Why is Lisbon attracting so many tech companies and talent? Carlos Moedas welcomes Cloudflare to his city — we’re growing fast in the city, and we have more than 80 job openings in the country. He also talks about why Portugal’s capital is so special and should be considered by company leaders who want to grow innovative companies. Paddy Cosgrave, from the Web Summit, told us something similar four weeks ago.

The ambition? “Make Lisbon the capital of innovation of the world” or, at least, of Europe. The new mayor also has a project called Unicorn Factory to achieve just that.

Cloudflare engineer from the Tunnel Team

Also, at the event was our very own engineer Sudarsan Reddy (based in Lisbon). We asked him some questions about Cloudflare Tunnel, our tunneling software that lets you quickly secure and encrypt application traffic to any type of infrastructure, so you can hide your server IP addresses, block direct attacks, and get back to delivering great applications.

Sudarsan focuses on what Tunnel is, why it is relevant, how it works and examples of situations where it can make a difference.

Co-founder & CEO, Quit Genius

Yusuf graduated as a doctor from Imperial College School of Medicine, in London, but joined two passions, healthcare and technology, when he co-founded Quit Genius. He explains how in just 18 months the pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital health by 10 years, and there’s no going back. “The Internet enables people to unlock improvements to their lives, and digital healthcare went from being convenient to a necessity”.

We dig into the benefits of digital healthcare, but also the scrutiny that is needed in technology, now that it is more powerful than ever and cemented in people's lives. Yusuf also gives examples of how his digital clinic is helping people in treating tobacco, vaping, alcohol, and opioid addictions.

Yusuf has co-authored 12 peer-reviewed studies on behavioural health and substance addictions. He was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List of 2018 and in Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business.

American futurist and Professor of Practice, AI & Innovation with Imperial College Business School in London

David sums up how the pandemic has affected people's relationship with technology: “Everyone is tired of Zoom calls, but the convenience opened people's minds”.

We also talk about the digital divide, about human-centered ways of working with AI, and we also address the potential in VR and AR and how nobody saw the sharing economy coming 20 years ago and, now, “it's incredible to see how people embraced blockchain and the digitalization of financial services”.

Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at King's College London, Director of the NIHR Clinical Research Network: Mental Health

As someone with experience in the psychology field for more than 50 years, Dame Til Wykes still had to learn new ways of engaging with patients throughout the pandemic — and even learn which buttons to push on a computer to make Zoom calls. COVID-19 and the hardships of the pandemic made people more aware and ready to talk about their mental health issues, like anxiety or depression. But the pandemic wasn’t the same for everyone and Dame Til Wykes is worried about some of the effects, “most of them remain to be seen”.

Remote consultations were a big help, but she reminds us that in her field it is important to see the whole person and not just the face — for example, “if someone is tapping a foot nervously while giving us a smile, that tells us something that we cannot see in a Zoom call”. She also mentions the adoption of meditation apps bringing a form of help to some was another positive trend in this difficult period, as well as the reset button the pandemic brought to some people's lives.

In June 2020, Cloudflare TV made its debut: a 24/7 streaming video channel, focused on topics related to building a better Internet (and the people working toward that goal). Today, over 1,000 live shows later, we’re excited to announce that we're making the technology we used to build Cloudflare TV available to any other business that wants to run their own 24x7 streaming network. But, before we get to that, it’s worth reflecting on what it's been like for us to run one ourselves.

Let’s take it from the top.

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment in every way you could think of, one we hoped would help capture the serendipity of in-person events in a world where those were few and far between. It didn’t take long before we realized we had something special on our hands. Not only was the Cloudflare team thriving on-screen, showcasing an amazing array of talent and expertise — they were having a great time doing it. Cloudflare TV became a virtual watercooler, spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV.

One of the amazing things about Cloudflare TV has been the breadth of content it’s inspired. Since launching, CFTV has hosted over 1,000 live sessions, featuring everything from marquee customer events with VIP speakers to game shows and DJ sets. Cloudflare’s employee resource groups have hosted hundreds of sessions speaking to their unique experiences, sharing a wealth of advice with the next generation of technology leaders. All told, we’ve welcomed over 650 Cloudflare employees and interns — and over 500 external guests, including the likes of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Gradient Ventures board partner Bonita Stewart, Broadcom CTO Andy Nallappan, and Zendesk SVP Christina Liu.

Tune In, Geek Out: A CFTV Montage

This is Cloudflare TV, so of course we put an emphasis on technical content for viewers of all stripes. When we announce a new product or protocol on the Cloudflare Blog, we often host live sessions on CFTV the same day, featuring the engineers who wrote the code that just shipped. Every week, we broadcast episodes on cryptography, on learning how to code, and on the hardware that powers Cloudflare’s network in over 250 cities around the world.

Whether you’re new to Cloudflare TV or a longtime viewer, we encourage you to pay a visit to the just-launched Discover page, where you’ll find many of our most-loved shows on demand, ranging from Latest from Product and Engineering, to perennial favorite Silicon Valley Squares, to Yes We Can, featuring women leaders from across the tech industry. You can also browse upcoming Live segments and easily add them to your calendar.

One of the most promising indicators that we’re on the right track has been the feedback we’ve gotten, not just from viewers — but from companies eager to know which platform we were using to power CFTV. To date we haven’t had much to offer them other than our sincere thanks, but as of today we’re able to share something much more exciting.

But first: a look behind the scenes.

We didn’t initially set out to build Cloudflare TV from scratch. But as we explored our available options, we quickly realized that few solutions were designed for 24/7 linear streaming, and fewer still were optimized to be managed by a globally-distributed team. Thankfully, at Cloudflare, we like to build.

Our engineers worked at a blazing pace to build our own homegrown system, tapping open-source projects where we could, and inventing the things that didn’t yet exist. Among the starring components:

• Brave (BBC) — Brave is an open-source project named for a highly descriptive acronym: Basic Real-Time Audio Video Editor. It serves as the Cloudflare TV switchboard, allowing us to jump from live content to commercial to a pre-recorded session and back automatically, based on our broadcast schedule. The only issue with Brave is that, as the BBC put it: it’s a prototype. One that hasn’t been updated since 2018...

The CFTV Switchboard (Now streaming: Latest from Product & Engineering)

• Zoom — When we first designed Cloudflare TV, there was one directive that stood above the others: it had to be easy. If presenters had to deal with installing a browser plugin or unfamiliar app, we knew we’d lose many of them — especially external guests. Zoom emerged as the clear answer, and thanks to its RTMP broadcast feature, it’s worked seamlessly to facilitate live content on Cloudflare TV. In most cases, participating in a CFTV session is as simple as joining a Zoom meeting.

• Cloudflare Workers — Put simply, Cloudflare TV wouldn’t exist were it not for Cloudflare Workers. Workers is the glue that brings together each of the disparate components of the platform — handling authentication, application logic, securely relaying data from our backend to our frontend, and sprinkling SEO optimizations across the site. It’s the first tool we reach for, and often the only one we need.

• Cloudflare Stream — With over 1,000 episodes in our content library, we have a lot of assets to manage. Thankfully Stream makes it easy: episodes are uploaded and automatically transcoded to the appropriate bitrate, and we use Stream embeds to power Video on Demand across the entire platform. We also use the Stream API to deliver recordings to our backend switchboard so that they can be seamlessly rebroadcast alongside our Live sessions.

• Cloudflare for Teams — Cloudflare TV is obviously public-facing, but there are an array of dashboards and admin interfaces that are only accessible to select members of the Cloudflare team. Thankfully the Cloudflare for Teams suite, including Cloudflare Access, makes it easy for us to set up custom rulesets that keep everything secure, without any cumbersome VPNs or authentication hurdles.

We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t enough for Cloudflare TV to be easy for presenters — we needed to be able to run it with a relatively small team, working remotely, most of whom were juggling other responsibilities.

A special shoutout goes to the members of Cloudflare's office and executive admin teams, whose roles were dramatically impacted by the pandemic. Each of them has stepped up and taken on the mantle of Cloudflare TV Producer, providing technical support, calming nerves, and facilitating each one of our live sessions. We couldn’t do it without them, nor would we want to.

Even so, running a TV station is a lot of work, and we had little choice but to make the platform as efficient as possible — automating away our pain points, and developing intuitive admin tools to empower our team. Here are some of the key contributors to the system’s efficiency:

The Auto-Switcher — CFTV’s schedule features hundreds of sessions every week, including weekends, which would be prohibitive if any manual switching were involved. Thankfully the system operates essentially on auto-pilot. This is no simple playlist: every minute, a program running on Cloudflare Workers syncs with the CFTV backend to queue up recordings and inputs for upcoming sessions, deleting those belonging to sessions that have already aired. If we take a week off over the holidays, Cloudflare TV will keep on humming.

The Auto-Scheduler — Scheduling CFTV content by hand (well over 250 segments per week) quickly went from a meaningful exercise to a perverse task. By week two we knew we had to figure something else out. And so the auto-scheduler was born, allowing us to select an arbitrary window of time and populate it with recordings from our content library, filling in any time slots between live segments.

Segments can be dragged, dropped, added, and removed in a couple of clicks; one person can schedule the entire week in less than an hour. The auto-scheduler intelligently rotates through each episode in the catalog to ensure they all get airtime — and we see plenty of opportunities for it to get smarter.

The Broadcasting Center — The lifeblood of Cloudflare TV is our live segments, so we naturally spend a lot of time trying to improve the experience for presenters. The Broadcasting Center is their home base: a page that loads automatically for each session’s host, providing them a countdown timer and other essentials. And because viewer engagement is a crucial part of what makes live programming special, it features a section for viewer questions — including a call-in feature, which records and automatically transcribes questions phoned in by viewers.

Broadcasting Center — Presenter View

Meanwhile, our CFTV Producers use an administrative view of the same tool, where they check to make sure the stream is coming through clearly before each session begins. A set of admin controls allow them to troubleshoot if needed, and they can moderate viewer questions as well.

For both producers and presenters, the Broadcasting Center provides a single control plane to manage a live session. This ease-of-use goes a long way toward keeping the system running smoothly with a lean team.

Broadcasting Center — Admin View

One reason we’ve invested in Cloudflare TV is that it serves as fantastic platform for dogfooding — not only are we leveraging a broad array of Cloudflare’s media products, but our 24/7 linear content makes us a particularly demanding customer, with no appetite for arbitrary constraints like time limits or maintenance downtime.

With that in mind, we’re excited to integrate many of the new technologies Cloudflare is introducing this week, which will combine to power an overhauled version of the CFTV platform that we’re calling Cloudflare TV 2.0. Namely:

• Real Time Communications Platform — Today, Cloudflare announced its new Real Time Communications Platform, powered by WebRTC. In the near future, Cloudflare TV will leverage this platform to handle many of our live sessions. CFTV will continue to support Zoom, OBS, and any other application capable of outputting a RTMP stream, because convenience is one of the essential pillars in helping our presenters engage with the platform. But we see opportunities to push our creativity to new heights with custom, programmatically-controlled media streams — powered by Cloudflare’s Real-Time Communications Platform.

• Stream Live — CFTV’s backend server currently handles video encoding for our live broadcast, generating a stream that is relayed to a video.js embed. Replacing this setup with Stream Live will yield several key benefits: first, we will offload video encoding to Cloudflare’s global network, resulting in improved speed, reliability, and redundancy. It also means we’ll be able to generate multiple renditions of the broadcast at different bitrates, allowing us to offer streams that are optimized for mobile devices with limited bandwidth, and to dynamically switch between bitrates as a user’s network conditions change.

• Stream Connect — Today, the only way to watch Cloudflare TV is from the platform’s homepage — but there’s no reason we can’t syndicate it to other popular video platforms like YouTube. Stream Connect will become the primary endpoint for our backend mixer, and will in turn generate multiple copies of that stream, outputting to YouTube, the main broadcast, and any number of additional platforms.

We’re also actively working on a fresh implementation of our switchboard — one that is designed to be more reliable, scalable, and customizable. This switchboard will power the core of Cloudflare TV 2.0.

Cloudflare TV 2.0 will represent a major step forward for the platform, one that leverages over a year of insights as we rearchitect the system from its core to take full advantage of the Cloudflare network. And we’re doing it with you in mind: the same technology will be used to power Cloudflare TV as a Service.

Most products at Cloudflare are designed to scale from individuals up to the largest businesses. This is not one of those. Running a 24x7 streaming network takes a lot of time and effort. While we've made it easier than ever before, this is a product really designed for businesses that are willing to make a commitment similar to what we have at Cloudflare. But, if you are, we're here to tell you that running a streaming service is incredibly rewarding, and we want to enable more companies to do it.

Interested? Fill out this form and, if it looks like you'd be a good fit, we'll reach out and work with you to help build your own streaming service.

In the meantime, don’t miss out on Stream Live and the new Real Time Communications Platform. There’s no reason you can’t start building today.

Last week, Cloudflare TV celebrated its first anniversary the only way it knows how: with a broadcast brimming with live programming spanning everything from the keynotes of Cloudflare Connect, to a day-long virtual career fair, to our flagship game show Silicon Valley Squares.

When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.

The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.

Since launching in June 2020, Cloudflare TV has featured over 1,000 original live episodes covering an incredible array of topics: technical deep dives and tutorials like Hardware at Cloudflare, Leveling up Web Performance with HTTP/3, and Hacker Time. Security expertise from top CISOs and compliance experts. In-depth policy discussions. And of course, updates on Cloudflare’s products with weekly episodes of Latest from Product and Engineering, Estas Semanas en Cloudflare en Español, and launch-day introductions to Magic WAN, Magic Firewall, Cloudflare Pages, and Stream Connect.

We’ve seen a wealth of content that can only be described as inspirational — like Vets at Cloudflare exploring the journeys of military veterans, This is What a Technologist Looks Like showcasing diversity across the industry, and Yes We Can, Cloudflare co-founder, President & COO Michelle Zatlyn’s series debunking the myth that there are no women in tech. Founder Focus has shared the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs, Between Two Clouds delves into the world of customer support, and series like Home Office TV and Cooking With Cloudflare have given an inside look at the personalities (and recipes) that make the Cloudflare community so unique.

All told, Cloudflare TV has featured well over one thousand presenters and their illustrious guests. We’ve been fortunate to welcome the likes of Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom; Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; John Collison, co-founder and President of Stripe; and Jackie Smalls, Chief Programs Officer at Code.org, to name a few.

We’ve also seen amazing contributions from Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups — including Latinflare celebrating Cinco De Mayo, Womenflare celebrating Women’s Empowerment Month, Asianflare and Desiflare celebrating APAC Heritage Month, Afroflare celebrating Black History Month (UK & US), Mindflare (supporting mental health awareness), Cloudflare’s sustainability group, Greencloud, and Proudflare, Cloudflare’s LGBTQIA+ group, which is celebrating Pride all month long.

The feedback from fans has been extraordinary. We regularly receive messages from viewers telling us how much they were inspired by a recent guest, or sharing that they leave Cloudflare TV “playing in the background all day.” You can tell they care, because they also let us know that they don’t appreciate when the commercials are louder than the program itself (we’re working on that!)

Perhaps the most meaningful impact of Cloudflare TV has been the way it’s connected the Cloudflare team. Cloudflare is growing quickly, and many team members have never set foot in a Cloudflare office. For anyone who is new to the company, Cloudflare TV has served as a way to get to know their colleagues, and vice versa. Job candidates use it to learn about the teams they aspire to work on. And we all get an excuse to talk to folks beyond the borders of our usual Zoom calls. It is, in a sense, the ultimate virtual water cooler — and the water is spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV. It’s a potent mix that often leads to declarations of, “that was fun!”

It sure is.

Supporting such a broad array of on-air talent is no small feat, and we have an amazing production team that helps ensure every session goes smoothly (give or take). Many of our Cloudflare TV Producers have roles at Cloudflare that were radically impacted by the pandemic, including our office management and executive admin teams. Few of them had prior TV experience. But that hasn’t kept them from becoming absolutely indispensable.

Before each and every live session — all 1,000+ of them — Cloudflare TV’s producers join our hosts to make sure they have everything they need. They provide crucial technical support, soothe pre-show jitters, and deal with the myriad tiny (and not-so-tiny) emergencies that make live TV so exciting. They are television producers in every sense of the word, and they have helped make this newfangled platform a very human experience, at a time when such things matter.

Also, our engineers are pretty great too. Speaking of which...

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment, and that label still applies. We’re finding creative ways to navigate our own pain points, dogfooding Cloudflare’s newest technologies, and generally trying to take advantage of the fact that this is not well-charted territory. We’ll soon share more technical details on how we run a TV station 24/7, and some of the tools we’re building along the way. Here's an appetizer.

Our product roadmap includes many of the things you’d expect, like an easier way to find your favorite episodes, and to hear about upcoming new ones. The rainbow bars adorning this blog post will make fewer cameos on the broadcast itself. And just like any good experiment: there will be surprises.

So tune in, geek out — and don’t touch that dial.

Black history is not only relevant, it is how we ensure that our heroes are not forgotten and that we have a viable future in our respective industries. As Carter G. Woodson famously said, “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

As the US leaders of Afroflare, Cloudflare’s employee resource group (ERG) for employees of African descent, we made a personal commitment this month and beyond to effectively represent, build, and grow at Cloudflare and in the tech industry.

To honor that commitment, we decided to tackle some commonly asked questions about the state of African-Americans in tech.

The latest report on diversity in high tech from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in May 2016, indicated African-Americans made up 7.4% of the high tech workforce, with less than 1% in Manager or Executive roles.

An updated report hasn’t been released, but according to USA Today, Wired, and Fortune, Black workers made up between 1% and 6% of Black of the tech workforce from 2018-2019.

According to the EEOC, some factors driving the lack of diversity in high tech include:

• The "pipeline" problem - traditional recruiting efforts depend heavily on individuals’ personal networks, which in the US, are typically not diverse.

• The inhospitable culture in relevant industries and occupations forcing women and minorities to tolerate the environment or leave the field.

• The reluctance of high tech companies to train new employees.

• The fast-changing nature of the industry.

The future of African-Americans in tech is dependent on the concerted and consistent effort of all high tech employees and departments.

Recruiters can build a more diverse pipeline by building relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), attending events like Afrotech, or partnering with organizations whose mission is aligned with increasing diversity in tech. We have highlighted a few notable organizations below.

Black Girls Code, founded in April 2011, focuses on teaching young African-American girls how to code in several programming languages. They hope to “bridge the digital divide” in a society that pits underrepresented, young, aspiring, girls against more privileged individuals. They aim to “provide African-American youth with the skills to occupy some of the 1.4 million computing job openings expected to be available in the U.S. by 2020, and to train 1 million girls by 2040.”

/dev/color is a non-profit foundation led by supporters of inclusion in the tech industry with a mission to “empower Black software engineers to help one another grow into industry leaders.” /dev/color does this by focusing on helping individuals find new jobs, assist with start-ups, and most importantly, ensure that engineers find a sense of purpose in their careers and in tech.

Project Include uses data and advocacy to push diversity and inclusion initiatives in high tech. They work with companies to implement diversity initiatives that focus on three core concepts: inclusion, comprehensiveness, and accountability. Project Include shares a powerful message about what it takes to ‘walk the talk’ when it comes to diversity:

“Change is hard, especially around a multidimensional issue like diversity. It is easy for all of us to become defensive and emotional, to shift the blame to others, and to feel fundamentally unheard or misunderstood. It is so uncomfortable for us to talk about the diversity problem that we have not been able to acknowledge it in full.”

These are a few of the many tech events and organizations working to solve this problem. However, doing this work takes more than just money. It involves having difficult conversations, training employees on ally skills, and supporting ERGs to celebrate and educate tech companies on different experiences, which is what we do here at Cloudflare.

As Cloudflarians, we come to work every day to build a better Internet. As Afroflarians, we want to acknowledge the current industry problems around inclusion and work tirelessly to build a better tech industry that welcomes and supports everyone. Not just during Black History Month, but always.

We urge you to do the same.

Afroflare at Afrotech in Oakland (November 2019)

Afroflare at Afrotech in Oakland (November 2019)

Afroflare at Afrotech in Oakland (November 2019)