OpenTelemetry project update: Wrapping up bootstrapping

OpenTelemetry has made good progress over the last few months. We have a buzzing community of smart, invested people. A few special interest groups (SIGs) formed and established a healthy cadence to discuss various aspects of the project. And we have a clear plan in mind on how to get to the planned release of a converged project in September.

We also established governance, project membership and contribution guidelines. We have designed all of the above to make it easy to engage with the project, and also to give individual SIGs (“special interest groups”) the authority to operate with independence and velocity. We also encourage corporate diversity so every SIG will be led by more than one company.

We defined three levels of engagement with the project — member, approver and maintainer. Maintainers have ultimate control on how to run the SIG. They are responsible for moving the project forward and make sure its development is aligned with technical committee guidelines. They also welcome the new members and approvers for the SIG. Approvers are highly engaged in their SIG and help maintainers with issue triage, code reviews and, of course, contributions.

In order to bootstrap the SIGs, the governance committee nominated appropriate people and asked for their commitment to bootstrap those respective groups as maintainers or approvers. These maintainers and approvers were nominated based on their interests, level of commitment and previous engagement with the OpenCensus and/or OpenTracing projects.

Now, for the most of the groups we have a critical mass of people to switch to “self-service” mode. As such, we will stop the bootstrap-nomination process and will instead ask SIG maintainers to start following the ongoing written rules of project membership. Beginning on July 1, SIGs which have at least two maintainers from different companies will be switched to self-service mode and will not accept new nominations outside of the standard process.

The technical committee will be tasked with defining and bootstrapping new SIGs in the future, and with helping existing SIGs maintain the right level of engagement from their maintainers.

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