Yesterday, Malte Ubl, tech leader in the AMP project at Google, announced that the AMP Project team is planning to set up an open governance model for the AMP Project. Following this, the team released a proposal for a new, open governance model.
The AMP Project team along with the rest of the AMP community plan to refine the governance proposal. They also plan to carry on this process at the AMP Contributor Summit that will be held next week from September 25th to 26th at Google, Mountain View, United States. The review period for the proposal will end on October 25, 2018 with a goal of implementing the new governance model shortly thereafter.
Why an open governance model for AMP?
Malte Ubl, describes in his post that, “When choosing a governance model (a system that describes how decisions are made) for AMP, we initially focused on agility. AMP has always been powered by the voices and feedback of the developers and organizations that use it; however, governance was centered around the tech lead, who ultimately decided what got executed and how. While this works great for smaller projects, we’ve found that it doesn’t scale to the size of the AMP Project today.”
The AMP Project team wanted to move to a model that could explicitly give a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users. Thus, the team decided to move on to a consensus-seeking governance model following the footsteps of the Node.js project, which has a similar implementation.
AMP currently has an overall 710 contributors which includes only 22% from Google employees, and 78% coming from other companies such as Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, and eBay. Interestingly, in the last 30 days alone over 350 contributions landed in AMP!
Significant changes in the new open governance model for AMP
Power to make decisions now moves to Technical Steering Committee (TSC)
The power to make significant decisions in the AMP Project will move from a single Tech Lead to a Technical Steering Committee (TSC). This will include representatives from companies that have committed resources to building AMP, with the end goal of not having any company sit on more than a third of the seats.
Plans to set up an Advisory Committee to advise the TSC
An Advisory Committee with representation from many of AMP’s constituencies will advise the TSC. Representatives from publishers (El País, Washington Post and Terra), e-commerce sites (AliExpress and eBay) and platforms (Cloudflare and Automattic) as well as advocates for an open web (Léonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google/Chrome, and Terence Eden) have agreed to join the Advisory Committee.
Working groups will replace informal teams
Working Groups with ownership over certain aspects of AMP (such as the UI, infrastructure and documentation) will replace the informal teams that exist today. These Working Groups will have a clear mechanism for input and a well-defined decision-making process.
To know more about the goals of the open governance model in detail, head over to Malte Ubl’s post on AMP blog.
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