Announcing the OpenSearch Project Leadership Committee

Tue, Dec 12, 2023 · Amitai Stern, Anandhi Bumstead, Andriy Redko, Charlotte Henkle, Eli Fisher, Grant Ingersoll, Jonah Kowall, Kris Freedain, Mark Cohen, Mehul A. Shah, Nick Knize, Nithya Ruff, Samuel Herman

Earlier this year, the OpenSearch Project celebrated its two-year anniversary as an Apache 2.0–licensed project. Since its inception, the project has delivered 2 major and 14 minor releases, growing to over 1,000 contributors, including 200 maintainers spanning 17 organizations. In this time, AWS has acted as the steward of OpenSearch, opening the release process, hosting a Slack instance and forums, and creating public development and triage meetings. The OpenSearch Project recognizes that we can still do better in transparent decision-making, and we are taking another step on our journey toward a community-driven model of governance. We are thrilled to announce a sustaining OpenSearch Project Leadership Committee (LC) to help the OpenSearch community advance toward these goals.

The goal of the LC is to preserve and advance the OpenSearch Project in order to benefit the OpenSearch community and represent its views. The OpenSearch community includes its maintainers, users, and contributing organizations. The LC, therefore, comprises of OpenSearch maintainers, repository owners, product developers, engineers, developer advocates, and employees of companies using OpenSearch in their products. It is a long-term focus group that will inform the governance of the open-source project, and its membership will be determined by the OpenSearch community. The initial members of the LC have each invested time and effort in developing OpenSearch in some way since the start of the project. We, Anandhi Bumstead (AWS), Mark Cohen (AWS), Eli Fisher (AWS), Kris Freedain (AWS), Charlotte Henkle (AWS), Samuel Herman (Oracle), Grant Ingersoll (Develomentor/Lucene), Nicholas Knize (AWS/Lucene), Jonah Kowall (Aiven/Cloud Native Computing Foundation), Andriy Redko (Aiven), Nithya Ruff (Amazon/Linux Foundation), Mehul A. Shah (Aryn.ai), and Amitai Stern (Logz.io), are happy to be involved as the initial members of the committee.

OpenSearch needs more focus in two areas on which the LC will act. First, we will be intentional about the future of the project and the vision of where OpenSearch belongs for the long-term viability of it as an open-source project for the community and by the community. Second, we will outline and publish documentation on how project decisions are made, defining principles of development, and defining responsibilities of members and maintainers.

We are passionate about open source and look forward to moving OpenSearch into a more open and transparent future. Please watch for additional communication from the LC in the coming weeks.

OpenSearch Project Leadership Committee meeting