AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages a protocol with some controversy and largely orchestrated by Google is now being essentially given back to the developer community in part by a new open governance that from initial reaction looks like the developer community is going to get behind.
For those of you that do not run websites what AMP does is essential in making ordinary website load much faster through mobile devices. While AMP has always been an Open standard up to this point Google largely dictated what got executed and when.
Google highlighted that 710 contributors, and 10,000 commits of which 78% came from other companies than Google. So these changes announced today look to be significant. From their blog post:
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. The change we are proposing is based on months of research, through which we’ve decided to follow the lead of the Node.js project and move to a consensus-seeking governance model.
The team that worked on the AMP Open governance model had a short list of goals.
- Encourage a wider variety of voices at all levels of contribution, including code contributions, setting the future direction of AMP and deciding which features and bug fixes should be worked on. This also means ensuring that the voices of those who do not contribute with code, but are nonetheless impacted by AMP, get heard.
- Make it more clear how an individual and a company can have a voice in AMP, from approving code changes to setting AMP’s technical and product roadmap.
- Avoid slowing down day-to-day work on AMP due to the governance model. The net effect of changes to the way people work on AMP should be neutral to positive in terms of productivity.
- Learn from what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for other open source projects. To this end, the AMP team talked to people from projects such as Node.js and Kubernetes, looked at governance philosophies from places like the JS Foundation and reviewed a wide variety of other open source and web standards governance documents.
Overall this is a great move by Google and should hasten the implementation of AMP. See the full details of their announcement.