# Announcing the OpenTelemetry Community Manager

OpenTelemetry has demonstrated massive growth since its inception in 2019. What
started as a handful of OpenTracing and OpenCensus maintainers and collaborators
meeting at the Google campus and over Zoom, has now grown into the second-most
popular project in the CNCF behind Kubernetes itself. Over
[5400 contributors and 700 companies](https://opentelemetry.devstats.cncf.io/d/74/contributions-chart?orgId=1&var-period=m&var-metric=contributions&var-repogroup_name=All&var-country_name=All&var-company_name=All&var-company=all&from=now-3y&to=now-2d)
have contributed code, issues, documentation, and invaluable feedback.

Our community isn’t just composed of these contributors, however - our
end-users, partners, integrators, and a whole host of other people make up the
OpenTelemetry community. In order to serve the needs of the wider end-user
community, the governance committee has formed a community manager role who can
focus on the needs of this large, and growing, group of humans.

Community managers are appointed by the Governance Committee and act as public
stewards of the contributor and end-user community. They’re responsible for
organizing events, coordinating cross-SIG and WG efforts to improve contributor
experience, managing the OpenTelemetry presence on social media, and working to
nurture and grow the OpenTelemetry community overall. Effectively, this is a new
project maintainer whose project is the OpenTelemetry community itself.

With that said, I’m happy to inform you that I have been designated the first
Community Manager for the OpenTelemetry project! As a former OpenTracing
maintainer, I’ve been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception, mostly
working on projects such as the website, hosting OpenTelemetry Tuesdays, and
helping organize events like OpenTelemetry Community Day. With this new role, I
plan to more formally establish OpenTelemetry Community Days around the world as
part of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon -- and additionally, help promote new end-user
and contributor events like OTel Unplugged (more on that in a week or so.)

What’s next? I hope to hear from you about what you need! I’ve started a
[thread](https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/discussions/1203) on the
Community Discussions in GitHub, and I’d love for you to post your questions,
comments, and suggestions for community initiatives and programs. This isn’t
just limited to end-users of OpenTelemetry, either -- how can I help in
improving the existing and new contributor experience? Please let me know!

If you’d like to reach out in other ways, you can find me on
[Twitter](https://twitter.com/@austinlparker) or on the
[Cloud Native Community Slack.](https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/CJFCJHG4Q)