Summary

  • OpenTelemetry’s charter sets 20 contributions in the prior rolling year as one route to voting eligibility, but explicitly says its heuristic is inaccurate and provides an exception route for non-code work and end-user adoption.
  • Four Governance Committee seats are at stake in October; the vote uses approval ballots, while a two-person company cap can alter which high-scoring candidates take seats.

An election rule can make participation easier to count without measuring all the work that sustains a project. OpenTelemetry makes that limitation unusually visible: its charter says the contribution heuristic will be inaccurate and will not represent the whole community, then directs applicants whose work is missed by the automated process to an exception route.

The normal “member of standing” test is a union, not a single code counter. It includes active contributors with at least 20 contributions to the OpenTelemetry GitHub organisation in the previous rolling year—pull requests, issues and comments count—and all organisational approvers and maintainers. The charter also points to maintainers of projects with strong end-user adoption that depend on OpenTelemetry APIs or formats, and to representatives of major end-user adopters, as people who may seek an exception. The Governance Committee decides requests by simple majority.

That route is now on the calendar. Nominations for the 2026 election close on 16 October at 23:59 Anywhere on Earth. The nominee list is due on 19 October; requests for voter-eligibility exceptions close on 23 October at 23:59 AoE. Voting opens at 12:00 UTC on 26 October and ends at 23:59 AoE on 28 October—11:59 UTC on 29 October. Four people will be elected for two-year terms to a nine-member committee.

The ballot is approval voting through Helios: each eligible voter may select up to four candidates, and the four highest eligible vote-getters win. Candidates need three endorsements from members of standing at three different companies. No more than two committee members may come from one company; if the score order would exceed that cap, the procedure says the election committee skips an ineligible nominee and selects the next-highest score. It promises public scores and public election materials. The 2026 election committee comprises three members whose terms do not expire this year.

Privacy and reviewability meet at the exception form. Only current Governance and election committee members may see applications, which are to be discarded one month after the election. Approved exceptions are added to the voter roll as they are processed; that roll lists members of standing and approved exceptions. The rules do not say that individual reasons for approval or denial will be published.

The prior election is a useful but limited benchmark: OpenTelemetry reported 702 eligible voters and 273 ballots in 2025, a 39% turnout. That number says nothing about the size or composition of the 2026 electorate. Nor does the published rule establish that anyone has actually been excluded. The story is the design choice itself: a reproducible count is the ordinary gate, but the project acknowledges that legitimacy also depends on a route for work the counter does not see.

Sources