Earlier this year, the OpenSearch Project celebrated its two-year anniversary as an Apache 2.0–licensed project. Since its inception, the project has delivered 2 major and 14 minor releases, growing to over 1,000 contributors, including 200 maintainers spanning 17 organizations. In this time, AWS has acted as the steward of OpenSearch, opening the release process, hosting a Slack instance and forums, and creating public development and triage meetings. The OpenSearch Project recognizes that we can still do better in transparent decision-making, and we are taking another step on our journey toward a community-driven model of governance. We are thrilled to announce a sustaining OpenSearch Project Leadership Committee (LC) to help the OpenSearch community advance toward these goals.
The goal of the LC is to preserve and advance the OpenSearch Project in order to benefit the OpenSearch community and represent its views. The OpenSearch community includes its maintainers, users, and contributing organizations. The LC, therefore, comprises of OpenSearch maintainers, repository owners, product developers, engineers, developer advocates, and employees of companies using OpenSearch in their products. It is a long-term focus group that will inform the governance of the open-source project, and its membership will be determined by the OpenSearch community. The initial members of the LC have each invested time and effort in developing OpenSearch in some way since the start of the project. We, Anandhi Bumstead (AWS), Mark Cohen (AWS), Eli Fisher (AWS), Kris Freedain (AWS), Charlotte Henkle (AWS), Samuel Herman (Oracle), Grant Ingersoll (Develomentor/Lucene), Nicholas Knize (AWS/Lucene), Jonah Kowall (Aiven/Cloud Native Computing Foundation), Andriy Redko (Aiven), Nithya Ruff (Amazon/Linux Foundation), Mehul A. Shah (Aryn.ai), and Amitai Stern (Logz.io), are happy to be involved as the initial members of the committee.
OpenSearch needs more focus in two areas on which the LC will act. First, we will be intentional about the future of the project and the vision of where OpenSearch belongs for the long-term viability of it as an open-source project for the community and by the community. Second, we will outline and publish documentation on how project decisions are made, defining principles of development, and defining responsibilities of members and maintainers.
We are passionate about open source and look forward to moving OpenSearch into a more open and transparent future. Please watch for additional communication from the LC in the coming weeks.

Authors
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Amitai Stern is a software engineer & manager of the Telemetry Storage Team at Logz.io. Amitai works on Big data, SaaS projects, leading feature development from design to production, and monitoring. He is a contributor to the OpenSearch open-source project, and has led the successful initiative at Logz.io to upgrade to OpenSearch.
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Andriy Redko is a seasoned software developer with a great passion to code, extensively working with JVM platform using Java, Groovy, Scala as well as other languages and technologies (Ruby, Grails, Play!, Akka, MySQL, PostreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, JUnit, etc.).
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Eli Fisher helped launch OpenSearch as the lead Product Manager at AWS on the project and is part of the technical steering committee.
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Grant Ingersoll is the Fractional CTO and technical advisor focused primarily on the search, NLP and machine learning space. He is the former CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation and the co-founder, CTO & Board Member of Lucidworks; co-author of Taming Text; co-founder of Apache Mahout and a long-standing committer on the Apache Lucene, Solr, and OpenSearch open source projects. Grant’s experience includes managing a large team of engineers, researchers, ML engineers and data scientists at a top ten website as well as engineering a number of search, question answering, and natural language processing applications for a variety of domains and languages. He earned his B.S. from Amherst College in Math and Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University.
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Jonah Kowall is currently between jobs but is a computer scientist, and open-source maintainer of Jaeger as well as being a contributor to OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry. Jonah is also on the OpenSearch Advisory Board. He is a technical product and engineering leader across startups to large enterprises specialized in operations, security, and performance. Led Gartner research on monitoring/observability. Product leadership at AppDynamics, Cisco (post-acquisition), Kentik, Logz.io, and Aiven.
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Kris Freedain is the Community Manager & a member of the Leadership Committee for the OpenSearch Project; his hobbies include gardening, garage gym powerlifting, and meditation.
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Mark Cohen is a Software Development Manager at AWS working on the OpenSearch Project.
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Mehul A. Shah is the Co-Founder of Aryn.ai. While everyone is working with AI these days, his background includes large-scale data management, distributed computing, and energy efficient computing. Prior to Aryn, Mehul was VP, Eng in Google Cloud, and GM of several AWS services: Glue, Lake Formation, and OpenSearch (Elasticsearch). His previous startup, Amiato, was acquired by Amazon. Before that, Mehul was a researcher at HP Labs, and he received a PhD from U.C. Berkeley and a MEng and B.S. from MIT in CS and Physics.
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Nick Knize is a Principal Engineer at AWS, and a committer and PMC member for the Apache Lucene project. He is a core maintainer for OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards.
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Nithya Ruff leads the open source program office at Amazon. On the board of the Linux Foundation.
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Samuel Herman is the architect of OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastrcture) OpenSearch service launched GA in 2022. Previously in his career Samuel led multiple projects and products for Observability logging and storage in both AWS and OCI.
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