open-telemetry
Improve communication with maintainers and contributors
This is a created after of today's Project triage - EU-friendly discussion.
There are a lot of information from TC, GC, Spec meetings that OTel maintainers (and other "long-living" contributors) should be aware of.
Right now, there is no single place/way to share important information (such us: creation of new SIG, bigger spec changes, infrastructure issues) with OTel maintainers. A lot of information is scattered around different Slack channels, Google Doc SIG meeting notes, GitHub issues, sometimes there is only a live announcement during a Zoom meeting (without any notes in any other communication channel).
This issue is just to collect/brainstorm some proposals.
Proposal, create a team with contain all maintainers' teams (maybe besides docs?).
This would make it easier to notify maintainers especially in GitHub community, Specification, Semantic Conventions issues that are common for any repository or language implementation.
There could be also two new teams "maintainers" (all repo maintainers) and "language-maintainers" for API/SDK (+Collector?) implementations.
This will allow "push" notifications via GitHub.
Side note:
I wanted to notify all maintainers so that they can share their proposals and opinions, but after
@open-telemetry/android-maintainers, @open-telemetry/arrow-maintainers, @open-telemetry/assign-reviewers-action-maintainers, @open-telemetry/browser-maintainers , @open-telemetry/collector-contrib-maintainers ...
I felt that I do not have time for it 😉
Proposal, publish short meeting notes (e.g. for Specification and Semantic Conventions, but maybe also TC/GC meetings) such as https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/issues/6648. This not only gives the reader a quick summary (and notification), but allows referencing meeting notes in other GitHub issues.
One other thing I tried in the past and that maintainers told me they liked was for every actionable change in the spec I created new issues in language repos, explaining what needs to be done and linking back to the spec PR or issue. This way maintainers didn't need to proactively monitor a new channel, the news landed right in their inbox they were already monitoring.
I did this manually in the past (copy/pasting 10 times), but can also be automated, e.g. tag PRs/issues with a label and have a bot create issues in language repos once the PR is merged.
Love the idea of automation to bring actionable changes closer to maintainers via issue creation. However, I still think that a separate channel for internal comms, as proposed above, would still be beneficial, as a more general communication channel.
Creating a separate blog would also benefit end users, which may occasionally get confused when they see a post aimed at maintainers/contributors. They'll know where to go for the type of content they want. If we create a separate blog we can then subscribe to that RSS on #otel-maintainers to close the loop
