What's Up, OTel? It's us, your community managers!
Hi, community! We are your newly appointed Community Managers. We’ve begun the initial transitional work behind the scenes, and we look forward to seeing more of you all in the very near future (KubeCon EU, anyone?). With great power comes great responsibility, and we want to hear from you as we look into expanding both the project and the community.
In the meantime, we wanted to (re-)introduce ourselves, and invite you to connect with us! Feel free to find us over on CNCF’s Slack; for now, you can ping us directly in #opentelemetry (we’re working on creating one single @ so you can easily reach all of us).
Reese Lee, Community Manager
I remember thinking “How cool!” when Austin Parker was announced as the first OTel Community Manager back in late 2022; by that time, I had been involved in the project for almost a year, having joined New Relic’s OpenTelemetry engineering team in November 2021. I didn’t know everything this new role entailed, but something about it just immediately resonated with me.
Over the next few years, I helped develop and grow the then-fledgling End-User Working Group into the End-User SIG it is today. I somehow overcame my shyness (believe it or not, I used to be very shy!) and fear of public speaking to deliver my very first talk ever at KubeCon EU 2022 (Valencia, Spain) about tail sampling with the collector.
Since then, I’ve delivered many more sessions about OTel (a bunch of them with Adriana!) at various conferences, worked on the inaugural OTel Unplugged that took place during KubeCon NA 2022 (Detroit, Michigan) and the OTel Observatory at KubeCons, written blog posts, reviewed CFPs as a Program Committee member for multiple events, contributed to docs (my proudest to-date is still this Venn diagram that I created and that was modified for the Sampling doc), interviewed contributors and end users, and more.
I take being appointed to this role with a significant amount of reverence and honor (along with a humbling dash of disbelief), and my goal is to do this wonderful community and project proud. Oh, and outside of my professional life, I enjoy reading sci-fi, watching horror movies, and training jiu-jitsu.
Reach me on Slack at @Reese Lee, or on LinkedIn.
Adriana Villela, Community Manager
If I were to tell my younger teenage self what I do for a living now, she would’ve definitely been shocked. I got an early start in computers. BASIC was my first language, and my first operating system was DOS. This was all thanks to my dad, who is a retired software architect and who has coded using punch cards (FORTRAN, I think), C++, SmallTalk, Java, Go, Kotlin, and, post-retirement, Rust. I, on the other hand, as an avid Star Trek fan, wanted to design spaceships and had planned to be an aerospace engineer. And yet, ironically, after a summer job writing code at the Canadian Space Agency, I decided that software was in my future. Spoiler: I graduated with an industrial engineering degree, which wasn’t related to software, but still offered a number of software-related classes.
My path to cloud native was a long one – I was in tech for 20 years, working mostly in large enterprise, closed systems, before I found my way into OpenTelemetry, first, managing an Observability practices team, and then as a Developer Advocate. In my first advocacy job, my manager, Austin Parker, who recruited me to work alongside them and Ted Young at Lightstep back in 2022 (talk about fangirling), encouraged me to contribute to OpenTelemetry. I started off with a few contributions to the OTel docs, and then in early 2023 joined Reese as co-chair of the OTel End User Working Group, which was later converted to a SIG. Together, we built up the SIG into what it is today – a vibrant, thriving community in which End Users get to connect with each other and the rest of the OTel community. I think one of our proudest moments was when we started seeing an increase in regular contributors to the SIG. The work we were doing was making a difference!
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to speak about OTel at a number of cloud native events, including KubeCon (EU, NA, Japan), Observability Day (EU, NA), Platform Engineering Day (NA), a number of KCDs (Porto, Warsaw), Open Source Summit (EU, NA, Japan) and Cloud Native Days (Bergen, Austria) around the world. Many of them, with Reese as my amazing co-speaker and partner in crime.
So when Austin asked Reese and me if we’d be interested in being OTel community managers, saying that we embody OTel, well… I can’t even express how flattering it was. To see our work recognized by the community like that brings tears to my eyes. For real. I’ve been searching my whole career for a place to fit in, and the OTel community has been that for me. I have finally found my tech home. I am very much looking forward to continuing to work with Reese, my OTel ride-or-die, and with Julia, whom I’ve known for the last few years from the CNCF Ambassadors circuit. Cheers to amazing months ahead!
Reach me on Slack at @Adriana Villela, or via one of my socials.
Julia Furst Morgado, Associate Community Manager
In 2022, I transitioned into tech and I became deeply involved in open source right away, contributing to the Kubernetes documentation, the OpenTelemetry documentation, and the CNCF glossary. I have always loved trying new things and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, sometimes literally, like jumping out of airplanes. Over time, that work led me to speak at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Chicago about becoming a CNCF Ambassador.
As I grew in the ecosystem, many people in the OpenTelemetry project supported me. They reviewed my pull requests, answered my questions, and helped me find my footing. That support gave me confidence and reinforced that this is a community that invests in its people. Now, serving the community in this capacity feels like a natural evolution of that journey and an opportunity to give back in a meaningful way.
For me, open source is ultimately about people. That is why I organize the KCD New York and the Cloud Native Meetup in New York. Strong technical ecosystems are sustained by connection and trust, not just code. When people feel welcomed, they step forward and take ownership. Creating spaces where that happens is what fuels me.
That is also why stepping into this role alongside two other incredible women means so much to me. The three of us are different in many ways. We come from different cultures, different experiences, and different paths into tech. Those differences influence how we listen and how we think about the future of the project.
OpenTelemetry should serve everyone. From someone writing their first instrumentation to experts managing complex distributed systems at scale, the project must feel accessible and valuable at every level. Diversity helps us think about all of those people, not just one type of contributor or user.
I am truly grateful to be nominated and excited to step into this new chapter. This is both a responsibility and a privilege, and I am ready to continue building, learning, and giving back to this community!
Reach me on Slack at @juliafmorgado, or via one of my socials.