Announcing the OpenTelemetry Community Manager

OpenTelemetry has demonstrated massive growth since its inception in 2019. What started as a handful of OpenTracing and OpenCensus maintainers and collaborators meeting at the Google campus and over Zoom, has now grown into the second-most popular project in the CNCF behind Kubernetes itself. Over 5400 contributors and 700 companies have contributed code, issues, documentation, and invaluable feedback.

Our community isn’t just composed of these contributors, however - our end-users, partners, integrators, and a whole host of other people make up the OpenTelemetry community. In order to serve the needs of the wider end-user community, the governance committee has formed a community manager role who can focus on the needs of this large, and growing, group of humans.

Community managers are appointed by the Governance Committee and act as public stewards of the contributor and end-user community. They’re responsible for organizing events, coordinating cross-SIG and WG efforts to improve contributor experience, managing the OpenTelemetry presence on social media, and working to nurture and grow the OpenTelemetry community overall. Effectively, this is a new project maintainer whose project is the OpenTelemetry community itself.

With that said, I’m happy to inform you that I have been designated the first Community Manager for the OpenTelemetry project! As a former OpenTracing maintainer, I’ve been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception, mostly working on projects such as the website, hosting OpenTelemetry Tuesdays, and helping organize events like OpenTelemetry Community Day. With this new role, I plan to more formally establish OpenTelemetry Community Days around the world as part of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon -- and additionally, help promote new end-user and contributor events like OTel Unplugged (more on that in a week or so.)

What’s next? I hope to hear from you about what you need! I’ve started a thread on the Community Discussions in GitHub, and I’d love for you to post your questions, comments, and suggestions for community initiatives and programs. This isn’t just limited to end-users of OpenTelemetry, either -- how can I help in improving the existing and new contributor experience? Please let me know!

If you’d like to reach out in other ways, you can find me on Twitter or on the Cloud Native Community Slack.