Proposed Governance Model for the AMP Project

Original author: Malte Ubl, Technical Lead of the Google AMP project

Translator: UC International R&D – Guoyong

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In the past two years, AMP has grown from a small open‑source project with only two contributors to a large effort involving over 700 people who have made more than 10,000 commits across millions of sites. When choosing a governance model for AMP, we initially focused on agility. AMP has continuously received feedback and suggestions from developers and organizations that use it; however, governance was mainly handled by a technical lead (that’s me, the author 🤣), who ultimately decided what would be implemented and how.

Although this approach works for smaller projects, we found it does not scale to the current size of AMP. We want to adopt a model that gives every community member a voice, including those who cannot contribute code directly, such as end‑users. After months of research, we decided to follow the leadership mechanisms used by the Node.js project and move toward a consensus‑based governance model.

AMP has received contributions from 710 contributors, 22% of which are Google employees and 78% from other companies (e.g., Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo, and eBay); in the last 30 days alone, more than 350 contributions were logged.

When creating this proposal for a new governance model (see Note 1), the AMP team had several goals in mind:

Broadly support diverse voices from contributors at all levels—including code contributors, those shaping AMP’s future direction, and those deciding which features and bug fixes to prioritize—while also ensuring that people who do not contribute code but are affected by AMP have their voices heard.

Gain clearer insight into how individuals and companies express opinions within AMP, from approving code changes to setting technical and product roadmaps.

Avoid slowing AMP’s day‑to‑day work due to governance overhead; the net effect of changes to AMP’s way of working should be neutral in terms of productivity.

Learn from other open‑source projects about what governance practices are effective or ineffective. To this end, the AMP team consulted with people from Node.js, Kubernetes, the JS Foundation, and reviewed various open‑source and web‑standard governance documents.

The proposal has been fully fleshed out, and several major changes in the new model include:

Shifting the authority to make major decisions from a single technical lead to a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) that includes representatives from companies that have contributed resources to AMP, with a cap that no single company can hold more than one‑third of the seats.

A representative advisory council drawn from many AMP constituencies will provide recommendations to the TSC.

Working groups that own specific aspects of AMP (e.g., UI, infrastructure, documentation) will replace the current informal teams, each with a clear intake mechanism and decision‑making process.

One of our top priorities is to finalize the initial membership of the AMP governance groups. If you are interested in joining any of these groups (see Note 2), please let us know. This is real work, and if your day‑to‑day responsibilities do not already cover it, we are prepared to compensate you! If you need financial support, indicate it in the form. We are especially interested in people with consumer rights and protection experience. We are also pleased to announce that we have spoken with several individuals who have agreed to join the advisory council, including publishers (El País, Washington Post, Terra), e‑commerce sites (AliExpress, eBay), platforms (Cloudflare, Automattic), and open‑web advocates (Léonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google/Chrome, and Terence Eden).

In addition, we are exploring turning AMP into future infrastructure and will seek input from the TSC, Advisory Council, and community over the coming months. We believe this governance change is the first step toward that direction.

We look forward to collaborating with other members of the AMP community to refine the governance plan, including at next week’s AMP Contributors Summit. Please review and comment on the proposal and join the scheduled design review discussion. The review period ends on October 25 2018, with the goal of implementing the new governance model shortly thereafter.

We are excited to see the AMP community take the next step and hope you will join us in making the web a better place for users and developers.

Note 1: AMP New Governance Model Proposal: https://github.com/ampproject/meta/pull/1

Note 2: https://goo.gl/forms/WCUDNX23CY9LL5xC2

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