Project: OpenTelemetry (Observability and Analysis / Observability)
File: governance-committee-candidates.md

In alphabetical order: Company: GitHub: Austin Parker is the Community Maintainer of OpenTelemetry and long-term contributor. They have been involved in the project since inception, and have been a consistent advocate, organizer, and contributor. Austin has been a maintainer of the Communications and Demo SIGs, a co-chair and organizer of Observability Day event at KubeCon EU and NA, has authored two books on distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry, and is an overall swell person. If elected, Austin will continue to work on community advocacy, outreach, and contributor experience. OpenTelemetry is only as successful as it is because of its community, and the GC's role is to nurture and guide that community. They will prioritize efforts to increase the contributor and maintainer community size, ensure that the project is welcoming and inclusive, and to guide the project towards graduation and long-term success. Company: Skyscanner GitHub: Im Daniel Gomez Blanco, Principal Software Engineer at Skyscanner where Ive been leading an organisation-wide observability transformation underpinned by the use OpenTelemetry across 1,000+ services, and Im asking for your vote to help me bring an end-user view to the Governance Committee. Over the last few years, my contributions to the community have been focused on advocating adoption of OpenTelemetry tooling in an efficient way, while promoting observability best practices to maximise the ROI of telemetry instrumentation. As external outputs, these contributions include: Authoring . Delivering conference talks (e.g. , , sharing my experience on how organisations can benefit from adopting OTel and how to do it efficiently. Participating in several interviews, case studies, panels, and podcasts to discuss observability best practices and the value of OTel. At Skyscanner, my job as a platform engineer involves driving the strategy for a transition to open standards with minimal friction, providing the necessary enablement tooling, and guiding over 700 engineers across dozens of teams to make the best use of each telemetry signal to instrument and observe their systems, from the client-side all the way down to backend services and their underlying infrastructure. Reaping the benefits of effective observability from the many terabytes of telemetry data going through our collectors every hour, and empowering a reliable experience for millions of users of our product each month, makes this an ever exciting challenge! Previous to OpenTelemetry, I have extensive experience as a platform engineer working in a wide range of observability-related areas, having led workstreams in frontend performance optimisation, custom telemetry pipelines, open-source observability tooling, and Kubernetes resource optimisation. As a practitioner, I believe I can bring first-hand insights to the GC about the challenges that organisations of any size can face, and help to drive initiatives to address those, bridging the gap between enablement and adoption. Company: GitHub: I'm Eric Sirianni, a technical leader at Confluent focused on Observability. My team currently operates an OpenTelemetry-based platform that powers several critical use cases within Confluent Cloud. We run a fleet of over 45,000 OpenTelemetry Collector agents in production, exporting telemetry to both internal and third-party systems. Our internal metrics pipeline ingests over 6 million datapoints per-second with less than 2 minute lag and serves over 300 queries per-second with sub-second

I introduced OpenTelemetry to Confluent's architecture in 2020 and have since been evangelizing its adoption across our platform. I also meet regularly with our Observability vendors to suggest and advocate OpenTelemetry-related features on their roadmaps. Over the past few years, I have been a fairly active participant in the OpenTelemetry community, primarily engaging in Slack discussions and submitting bug reports or feature requests. I've been very impressed with the enthusiasm and welcoming nature of the OTel community, as well as their openness and responsiveness to feedback. If elected, I hope to provide an end user's perspective to the GC and share my experiences as both an adopter and advocate for OpenTelemetry. <img src="static/johannes-tax.gif" alt="Johannes Tax" height="300" width="300"> Company: Grafana Labs GitHub: I have a multifaceted perspective on OpenTelemetry, from the point of view of users, contributors, and vendors. I currently help Grafana users be successful with OpenTelemetry instrumentation. Prior to that, I acted as an advocate for distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry at Microsoft, where I shaped the architecture of a high-volume distributed tracing backend that natively supports OpenTelemetry. As an initial contributor to the OpenTelemetry C++ project, I designed and implemented . I'm an [approver for OpenTelemetry semantic conventions](https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions#contributing) and I and lead a group dedicated to improving and stabilizing messaging semantic conventions. I continue to be impressed by the open and welcoming community. With full support from my employer, I am committed to nurturing this environment and further continuing to establish OpenTelemetry as a stable, comprehensive, and ubiquitous observability standard. Many amazing people devote their time to this project, and it's crucial to provide them with tools and processes that optimize their efforts. If elected, my aim is to enhance the existing tools and processes and establish new ones to support this goal. As a concrete example, I want to make it easier for subject matter experts to contribute to semantic conventions. Semantic conventions span a wide array of topics, and to produce high-quality conventions subject matter experts in each area are essential. Often, these experts are not observability specialists, and they require additional guidance and support to contribute effectively. I want to help to attract those experts to OpenTelemetry and make them productive members of the community. Company: Grafana Labs GitHub: I'm Juraci Paixo Krhling, a passionate open-source software engineer, and I'm seeking your support for my re-election to the OpenTelemetry Governing Board. My commitment to the project runs deep and I have chosen an employer willing to sponsor my upstream work full time. Since my election in 2021, I've actively contributed to the OpenTelemetry project and the wider observability

Here are some concrete examples of what I've accomplished during my tenure 2021-2023: Established the joint GC/TC call as an avenue for communication between the two groups Helped make the project more popular by talking about it at podcasts, conferences, and other similar events Attended the first in-person OTel leadership summit, discussing current challenges to the project and what we can do to overcome them Mediated conflicts, with the goal of keeping the OTel community welcoming to new members Actively proposed, reviewed, and voted on changes to the project Coordinated the participation of the OpenTelemetry project in the internship programs, successfully recruiting mentors among the OpenTelemetry maintainers Volunteered to be a sponsor for the SIG Security, taking an active participation there Connected people from different parts of the community based on the broader community view I obtained as being part of the board As an engineer, Im active in communities around the SIG Collector, where Im an [approver in the core](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector#contributing) repository, and [maintainer in the contrib](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/#contributing) repository, being the author or code owner for several components, including the [load-balancing exporter](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/exporter/loadbalancingexporter#trace-idservice-name-aware-load-balancing-exporter) and [tail-sampling processor](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/processor/tailsamplingprocessor#tail-sampling-processor), which together allow open-source users to achieve a scalable tail-sampling deployment without getting locked-in with specific vendors. Im also the creator of the [OpenTelemetry Operator for Kubernetes](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator), having successfully fostered a community around it that is able to continue evolving further even after I stepped back from maintainership to focus on other OTel areas. Overall, Im very proud of my contributions to the project, placing me among the [top contributors](https://opentelemetry.devstats.cncf.io/d/9/developer-activity-counts-by-repository-group-table?orgId=1&var-periodname=Last%202%20years&var-metric=contributions&var-repogroupname=All&var-country_name=All) to the project since the last election. My commitment to the project and the wider observability community goes beyond the technical contributions: I was part of the [Program Committee for several](https://www.credly.com/users/juraci-paixao-krohling/badges) editions of KubeCon, including North America (2023, 2022, 2021), Europe (2023, 2022, 2021), and China (2020). I also participated as a speaker or panel member in events like OTel Unplugged, Observability Day, KubeCon EU and NA, among others. As a side project, I run , where I produce quality and up-to-date content once a week about Observability and Monitoring with a strong focus on OpenTelemetry in my native language, Portuguese. Due to my community contributions I have been selected as a [CNCF Ambassador](https://www.cncf.io/people/ambassadors/?sftlf-country=de&sftlf-expertise=technical&sftlf-project=opentelemetry&p=juraci-paixao-krohling) in 2023. If re-elected, I will continue to actively contribute, collaborate, foster collaboration, and drive the project's success. Your vote will enable me to further advance OpenTelemetry's mission and impact. Similar to last time, my main focus will be on ensuring that our decisions continue to be compatible with the interests of the broader open-source observability ecosystem, including users, developers, projects, and vendors. In addition, Ill continue OpenTelemetrys participation in Outreachy by recruiting maintainers to become mentors of new interns. My goal is to participate in all Outreachy cohorts for the next two years. For your reference, my 2021 platform can be found . Thank you for your support in ensuring the continued growth and success of OpenTelemetry. <img src="static/severin-neumann.jpg" alt="Severin Neumann" height="400" width="400"> Company: GitHub: I have been a software engineer for over 20 years and . Three years ago, and have since become a . Along this journey, I have learned from best practices, made mistakes, and enjoyed interacting with the fantastic people in the OpenTelemetry community. Each role in a contributor's journey is crucial to the success of OpenTelemetry and presents its own challenges. If elected to the Governance Committee, my goal, in collaboration with other community leaders such as the Governance Committee, Technical Committee, and maintainers, is to: Lower the barrier for new contributors: With my experience in leading OpenTelemetry efforts at Cisco, I have successfully encouraged to make contributions. I have learned about the challenges they face and how to address them, such as providing precise guidelines and offering one-on-one

I want to utilize this experience to make it easier for new contributors to get started and become long-term contributors. My goal is to work with the community to identify effective means of lowering the barrier for new contributors and implement them. Help existing contributors advance: We want and need first-time contributors to stay and become established members of the community. I believe that recognition for contributions plays a key role in retaining contributors. As the OpenTelemetry community grows rapidly, it becomes challenging to keep track of all the great work happening outside of repositories. My goal is to establish means to recognize and reward contributions at a community-wide level and support contributors on their journey to becoming approvers, maintainers, and leaders. This includes addressing the need to properly track and recognize contributions that may not be currently accounted for, such as giving talks, actively participating in SIG calls, or helping in the community forum. Support maintainers: Maintainers are the backbone of the OpenTelemetry community, often contributing in their spare time. To sustainably fulfill their role, maintainers need to be effective and face minimal friction. I believe that SIGs can learn from each other and share best practices to achieve this. My goal is to uncover these opportunities and provide SIGs with the support they need to be more effective and sustainable. Additionally, I will help to look beyond OpenTelemetry and learn from other successful OSS communities. Drive interaction and integration with the wider OSS community: It is part of that high-quality telemetry should be built in to the entire software stack just like comments are today. Therefore, it is crucial to actively engage with the wider OSS community and establish relationships with other projects. Strengthening existing relationships and establishing new ones will help us achieve our shared vision and mission. My goal is to drive the interaction and integration of OpenTelemetry with other OSS projects, to accomplish our shared vision and mission. I am a co-maintainer of SIG Communication () and focus on providing an easy entry to OpenTelemetry for end-users by leveraging the work of other SIGs. Currently, I am passionate about creating consistency in our documentation to improve maintainability and user experience. For example, I am driving the standardizing of guides and sections about across different languages. At Cisco, I am a member of the and actively drive an internal community around OpenTelemetry. Over the past two years, this community has grown from a handful of individuals to almost 100 contributors, with . I have also had the opportunity to speak about OpenTelemetry at and at and participate in the Thank you for being part of the awesome OpenTelemetry community! <img src="static/steve-flanders.jpg" alt="Steve Flanders photo" height="460" width="460"> Company: Splunk (formerly Omnition) GitHub: Hi! I'm an at Splunk and lead the Observability Getting Data In team which contributes extensively to OpenTelemetry. I have been in the monitoring/observability space for over a decade and involved in both the OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry projects from the

I am proud to be part of the incredible OpenTelemetry community and appreciate your consideration and vote! I helped co-create the OpenCensus Service and OpenTelemetry Collector with involvement from software development and architecture to product management and roadmap. Across many OpenTelemetry repositories I spend a lot of time on getting started, documentation, and examples. I also help promote and teach people about OpenTelemetry via conference talks, workshops, and blog posts. I authored the [OpenTelemetry incubation document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f4WQR6K84giyOCKjCsqcoVA8YUIzBhWZDVo3CwM1wuk/edit#heading=h.wrbwe8x26bft) and presented it to TAG Observability. Community, diversity, and positivity; recognize and appreciate everyone Listen, share, learn, grow, and laugh; focus on openness and collaboration Prioritize ease of use and customer experience always Continue to build a positive community where opinions are heard and valued Help prioritize and drive customer adoption and case studies Ensure the best documentation with getting started guides and demos Company: Lightstep GitHub: Hello, I'm one of the OpenTelemetry co-founders. My primary focus has been on API design, technical project management, and facilitation. For every new project within OpenTelemetry, my ethos has been to reach out to find new collaborators, give them the support that they need and set them up for success. When a project is stuck on design, or is missing a designer, then I will also help bottom line the design work. Examples include the many aspects of the tracing system, context propagation, error reporting, and our approach to stability/backwards compatibility. In the past, expanding the scope of OpenTelemetry has felt slow, especially when related to desiging and accepting new specifications. This perception was related to spreading ourselves too thin, starting too many new initiatives without first defining timelines, TC sponsors, and responsibilities. To address this, I've spent this past year developing a new project management workflow for OpenTelemetry, and we have had success rebooting several SIGs under this new process. I also facilitate conflict resolution, and I am available to all community members whenever they are experiencing any difficulty or frustration. In general, I try to keep OpenTelemetry a friendly, drama-free environment where collaboration is easy and enjoyable. I would like to continue this work with another term on the GC. This position aligns well with the facilitation and project management role that I currently perform for the OpenTelemetry community. If my approach to community management sounds good to you, please vote for me so that I may continue to help our amazing community grow and thrive! <img src="static/vijay-samuel.jpg" alt="Vijay Samuel" height="400" width="400"> Company: GitHub: Vijay Samuel is a Principal MTS, Architect at eBay and helps lead its internal Observability platform. He has been involved in the OpenTelemetry project for the last couple of years and has been a strong advocate for the project both within eBay and externally. Vijay has given talks at , done and written technical on the advantages of adopting OpenTelemetry within large organizations such as eBay. Vijay is also the co-chair of TAG Observability's Query Language Standardization working group. Vijay is passionate about Open Source and has contributed to various projects since the age of 19. He has a wealth of knowledge not only in being an adopter of OpenTelemetry but also in building out massive scale Observability platforms. If elected Vijay will bring a much-needed end user perspective to the GC, provide representation to the various end users and help the community understand their needs and requirements.