With "Open Governance Model" For AMP, Google Is Giving The Community Some Control

Google Accelerated Mobile Project, or AMP, is a website publishing technology created to improve the performance of web content and advertisements.

Ever since the AMP format was introduced in 2015, Google has said that the project is part of the open web, with open-source contributions from both Google employees and non-Googlers.

This makes AMP open for everyone, including Bing, eBay, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tencent and many others.

But since AMP was a Google-controlled format, the message didn't go well with the rest of the web community when it went live.

For this reason, Google announced that it is giving up some control of the AMP project, allowing the community to make decisions about its codes. Previously, the final decisions about AMP's code have been made by Malte Ubl, the head for the AMP Project at Google.

AMP contributors
AMP had 710 contributors overall, 22% from Google employees, 78% from other companies. In the last 30 days alone over 350 contributions landed in AMP

To do this, Google moves the AMP Project to a "new governance model."

It's not rare for open-source projects to have one person in charge. But for AMP, the project has gone too large for one man to handle. AMP has become a massive project commanding many parts of the mobile web. As many websites serve their pages using AMP, the project has delivered a huge portion of traffic to websites.

According to Ubl’, "we’ve found that it doesn’t scale to the size of the AMP Project today. Instead, we want to move to a model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users."

With this open governance model, Google is giving back to the community something they long deserve.

And that is putting the decisions for the project into their hands, rather than a single company.

To make this open governance model work as intended, Google is creating a Technical Steering Committee, an Advisory Committee, and also Working Groups.

Ubl said that the structure was inspired by how the Node.js project is run.

Google has assigned non-Google people for the Advisory Committee, which include representatives from The Washington Post, AliExpress, eBay, Cloudflare, and Automattic. Ubl continued to say that the working group can also include "advocates for an open web," including "Léonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google / Chrome, and Terence Eden."

With the community's hands on the project, Google hopes that the future of AMP will create new web standards that are separate from AMP itself, looking forward for the W3C and WICG groups to adopt the new technologies that are inspired by AMP.

While the progress for the development is slow, making the larger mobile web controlled by its users and not by a centralized gatekeeper, is certainly a move to the right direction.

Published: 
19/09/2018