Last updated: September 2020
This document describes the bootstrapping process for the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee. It describes the formation of the initial governance committee and its core responsibilities. This includes its governance processes and processes to reform itself as necessary.
The initial role of the governance committee is to instantiate the formal process for OpenTelemetry governance. In addition to defining the initial governance process, the bootstrap committee strongly believes that it is important to provide a means for iterating the processes defined by the governance committee. We do not believe that we will get it right the first time, or possibly ever, and won’t even complete the governance development in a single shot. The role of the governance committee is to be a live, responsive body that can refactor and reform as necessary to adapt to a changing project and community.
The Governance Committee has a set of rights and responsibilities including the following:
- Charter for Technical Committee.
- Define, evolve, and defend a Code of Conduct, which must include a neutral, unbiased process for resolving conflicts.
- Define and evolve project governance structures and policies, including how contributors become committers/maintainers, approvers, reviewers, members, etc.
- Decide, for the purpose of elections, who can vote.
- Logo/landing page/marketing.
- Maintain relationships with CNCF. For instance, creating documents describing the project
- Define, evolve, and defend the vision, values, mission, and scope of the project - to establish and maintain the soul of OpenTelemetry.
- Decide how and when official releases of OpenTelemetry artifacts are made and what they include.
- Establish processes regarding, and provide a final escalation path for any contested OpenTelemetry related decision.
- Establish processes regarding other project resources/assets, including artifact repositories, build and test infrastructure, web sites and their domains, blogs, social-media accounts, etc.
- Request funds and other support from the CNCF (e.g. marketing, press, etc.).
- Delegate appropriate authority to trusted individuals.
This work is to be handled by the Governance Committee or delegated to other project groups like the Technical Committee (to be chartered by Fall 2019).
To bootstrap the process of OpenTelemetry governance, 5 individuals (Ben Sigelman, Bogdan Drutu, Sergey Kanzhelev, Sarah Novotny, and Yuri Shkuro) were identified to be the Bootstrap Committee, to provide the initial process that can bootstrap the remainder of the process.
The Bootstrap Committee will be replaced by the elected OpenTelemetry Governance Committee. Ultimately, the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee will consist of 9 individual members of the community elected for 2 year terms. The terms will be staggered with 1 year elections (alternating 4 seats and 5 seats).
To provide a level of continuity as this process is established, the initial committee will include continuity members, expanding the size to 9 members. Note that from the 2020 election to the 2021 election, the committee will include 11 members.
In 2019 as this approval is enacted, the committee consists of the members of the bootstrap committee (Ben Sigelman, Bogdan Drutu, Sarah Novotny, Sergey Kanzhelev, Yuri Shkuro) plus 4 positions to be elected from the community. Of the 4 members that are elected, 2 will have a two year term and 2 will have one year term.
One year later (in 2020) there will be an election to fill the two seats opening up, each with a two year term. The continuity members of the original bootstrap committee will continue to serve.
One year after that (2021), there will be an election to fill the 5 open seats on the governance committee. The previous continuity members are eligible to run for these seats.
The committee will continue to iterate with alternating elections of four and five members each year.
For clarity, a table describing this process is given below:
| Year | Continuity | Election Cohort #1 | Election Cohort #2 | GC size post-election |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 5 people | 2 people (2yr term) | 2 people (1yr term) | 9 people (+4) |
| 2020 | - | - | 4 people (2yr term) | 11 people (-2, +4) |
| 2021 | 0 people | 5 people (2yr term) | - | 9 people (-7, +5) |
| 2022 | - | - | 4 people (2yr term) | 9 people (-4, +4) |
| 2023 | - | 5 people (2yr term) | - | 9 people (-5, +5) |
Special note: The bootstrap committee pledges to recuse itself from any direct election activities while they serve as continuity members. Members of the bootstrap committee will refrain from endorsing or otherwise advocating for any candidate (with the exception that the members of the bootstrap committee may vote in the elections, and may choose to run in the 2021 election).
Standing in the OpenTelemetry community will be defined by the union of:
- Active members - those with 20 contributions (PRs, Issues, Comments etc.) in the prior rolling year.
- All approvers, and maintainers in the OpenTelemetry organization
Members who don’t meet the criteria above and are part of the following are encouraged to help us evolve the definition of Member of Standing through the Exception Process outline below.
- Maintainers for projects (vendors, OSS observability solutions, etc) with strong end-user adoption that have taken a hard dependency on OpenTelemetry APIs or data formats (one representative per project)
- Representatives from major organizations that have adopted OpenTelemetry as end-users (one representative per organization)
The bootstrap committee explicitly believes that this heuristic will be inaccurate and not represent the entire community. An exception form will be provided for people who have contributed to the project but may not meet these criteria. Exception eligibility applications will be approved by the bootstrap committee by a simple majority vote. The exception process will be used as data points for refining the criteria for the future.
Within its first year, the Governance Committee will redefine these criteria around a more robust idea of community membership.
Anyone may nominate either themselves or someone else to be a candidate in the election. To be ratified as a candidate, the nominee must accept the nomination and three Members of Standing (including the nominator, if she/he has standing) from three different employers, must endorse the nomination.
Nominators are free to nominate as many people as they wish to. Members of Standing may endorse multiple nominees, but we expect endorsements to be in good faith. If this turns out to be a problem, this will be reconsidered.
All Members of Standing are eligible to vote for the governance committee members.
Elections will be held using time-limited Condorcet ranking on CIVS. The top vote getters will be elected to the respective positions.
To encourage diversity there will be a maximum of one-third representation on the Governance Committee from any one company at any time. If the outcomes of an election result in greater than 1/3 representation (or maximum of two, whichever is greater), the lowest vote getters from any particular company will be removed until representation on the committee is less than one-third.
If percentages shift because of job changes, acquisitions, or other events, sufficient members of the committee must resign until max one-third representation is achieved. If it is impossible to find sufficient members to resign, the entire company’s representation will be removed and new special elections held. In the event of a question of company membership (for example evaluating independence of corporate subsidiaries) a majority of all non-involved Governance Committee members will decide.
Because of the need to bootstrap a staggered election cycle, some of the initial committee members will only serve a single year term. These two people will be selected from the "lowest vote getters" from the four non-continuity committee members in the initial election.
The bootstrap committee will operate the election and circulate a timeline for nominations, and the vote.
In the event of a resignation or other loss of a governance committee member, a special election for that position will be held as soon as possible. The same group of people as described in "eligibility for voting" will vote in the special election. A committee member elected in a special election will serve out the remainder of the term for the person they are replacing, regardless of the length of that remainder. If a continuity member resigns or otherwise is lost from the Committee, that position will not be filled.
To reduce the size of company advantages, candidates may not use their companies internal or external brand to campaign. Their employers cannot solicit votes on their behalf or sponsor candidates from partner organizations. Simply put, elections highlight individuals outside of their corporate role and should be treated as "brand free" activities.
At any time the governance committee may vote, via supermajority (greater than two-thirds of votes), to rewrite or remove any part of this charter. Beyond small tweaks, this should be used sparingly, if ever, and in the presence of clear failures of the process. We explicitly do not allocate a role for the broader community in reformulating governance, we believe that in such a case the community will "vote with their feet" by either leaving or forking the project.
Members of the governance committee will graduate to becoming Emeritus members of the governance committee.
Regular governance committee meetings will be held, at least once per month. The entire governance committee is generally expected to attend every meeting, but quorum is met with 2/3 attendance. If a member misses more than 50% of all meetings held within a six month period then they will be removed from the committee and a special election will be held. Recorded videos of the meetings will be made publicly available in a timely manner.
Non-recorded, closed meetings are reserved for confidential matters (for example, code of conduct issues) which are not appropriate to be shared with the broader community. Governance committee meetings can be made closed by a simple majority vote of the governance committee members, but closed meetings do not count towards the required meeting frequency. The governance committee will inform the community if a particular meeting is closed, as well as the general reasons for this, prior to the meeting taking place.