OTel Me How To Get My Open Source Community Taken Seriously: Lessons Learned as an OTel Maintainer

This conference talk explores strategies for building and growing successful open source communities, presented by OpenTelemetry maintainers Reese Lee from New Relic and Adriana Villela from Dynatrace. Learn valuable lessons from their experiences supporting the OpenTelemetry (OTel) community as Maintainers of the End User Special Interest Group (SIG). Discover practical approaches to improving open source projects through cross-SIG collaborations, encouraging meaningful contributions, demonstrating business value to end users, and fostering connections between users and contributors. The presenters share both successful strategies and challenges they've encountered, providing actionable insights that can be immediately implemented to strengthen open source communities. This 28-minute presentation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) offers essential guidance for anyone involved in open source project governance and community building.