Nearly 80 percent of AMP contributors are now third parties.
When the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Project began, the open-standard to enable publisher pages to load quickly on mobile was a Google-driven initiative. On Tuesday, the company said there are “more than 700 folks contributing over 10,000 commits running on many millions of websites.” Now Google says AMP is moving to an “open governance model.”
The announcement comes in advance of the AMP Contributor Summit, which is happening next week at Google’s Moutain View, California, headquarters. A review and comment period for the proposal will end on October 25. The new model will be implemented shortly thereafter.
Why is this happening? Despite the project being open-source, Google has dominated the execution and framing of AMP. Google’s integration of AMP listings at the top of search results is just one reason publishers have felt pressured to adopt the standard despite shortcomings.
The two-year-old project has now grown and evolved to the point where there are multiple constituencies involved. Until now, decisions about what updates and features got executed came down to one man: Malte Ubl, tech lead for the AMP Project at Google. Ubl wrote in Tuesday’s announcement that it is time for a more formal and inclusive governing structure.
According to stats released by Google, nearly 80 percent of contributions now come from the broader AMP publisher/developer community.
