From time to time, the Maintainers for a given OpenTelemetry SIG may be unable to reach consensus on a technical issue. While it's healthy and appropriate to make a sincere attempt to understand all points of view and consider the tradeoffs, it's also healthy to occasionally "disagree and commit."
Within OpenTelemetry, SIG Maintainers are chosen specifically because they are domain experts, so we would like to keep as much of the decision-making authority with the SIG Maintainers rather than immediately "escalating" to the overall OpenTelemetry-wide Technical Committee (TC). As such, this is OpenTelemetry's process for resolving technical issues where Maintainers cannot reach consensus:
- The SIG Maintainers should succinctly document the options under consideration as a GitHub issue within the SIG's respective repo (note that it is not required to document the complete framing and pros/cons – just the actual go-forward options themselves).
- Each SIG Maintainer must formally vote for their choice by commenting on that issue.
- The option receiving the most votes wins.
- If the vote is a tie, the OpenTelemetry TC should be brought into the discussion, and the TC itself gets a (single) tiebreaking vote.
While inevitably these sorts of decisions will be disappointing for somebody, it's incredibly important for the project to maintain velocity and recognize that we are all coming to these sorts of technical issues with the best of intentions and remain aligned about the overall goals of the OpenTelemetry project.