---
title: "SIG practices for approver and maintainers"
source: OpenTelemetry Documentation
source_url: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: opentelemetry-docs
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

This pages includes guidelines and some common practices used by approvers and
maintainers.

## Onboarding

If a contributor steps up to take on a role with more responsibility towards the
documentation (approver, maintainer) they will be onboarded by existing
approvers and maintainers:

- They are added to the `docs-approvers` (or `docs-maintainers`) group.
- They are added to the `#otel-comms` and `#otel-maintainers` and private
  in-team slack channels.
- They are asked to enroll for the calendar invites for
  [SIG Comms meeting](https://groups.google.com/a/opentelemetry.io/g/calendar-comms)
  and
  [maintainers meeting](https://groups.google.com/a/opentelemetry.io/g/calendar-maintainer-meeting).
- They are asked to verify that the current meeting time for SIG Comms works for
  them and if not to collaborate with existing approvers and maintainers to find
  a time that suits everyone.
- They are asked to review the different resources available for contributors:
  - [Community Resources](https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/),
    especially the document around
    [Community Membership](https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/community-membership.md)
    and the
    [social media guide](https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/social-media-guide.md).
  - [Contributing Guidelines](/docs/contributing) As part of this, they will
    review those documents and provide feedback for improving them via issues or
    pull requests.

Additional valuable resources to review are

- [Hugo documentation](https://gohugo.io/documentation/)
- [Docsy documentation](https://www.docsy.dev/docs/)
- [Marketing guidelines](/community/marketing-guidelines/), including the Linux
  Foundation’s branding and
  [trademark usage guidelines](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/trademark-usage).
  Those are especially valuable when reviewing entries to the registry,
  integrations, vendors, adopters or distributions.

## Collaboration

- Approvers and maintainers have different work schedules and circumstances.
  That's why all communication is assumed to be asynchronous and they should not
  feel obligated to reply outside of their normal schedule.
- When an approver or maintainer won't be available to contribute for an
  extended period of time (more than a few days or a week) or won't be available
  in that period of time, they should communicate this using the
  [#otel-comms](https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C02UN96HZH6) channel and
  updating the GitHub status.
- Approver and maintainer adhere to the
  [OTel Code of Conduct](https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/?tab=coc-ov-file#opentelemetry-community-code-of-conduct)
  and the [Community Values](/community/mission/#community-values). They are
  friendly and helpful towards contributors. In the case of a conflict,
  misunderstanding or any other kind of situation that makes an
  approver/maintainer feel uncomfortable they can step back from a conversation,
  issue or PR and ask another approver/maintainer to step in.

## Triage

### Issues

- Incoming issues are triaged by `@open-telemetry/docs-triagers` team.
- As a first step, a triager will read through an issue title and description
  and apply the following labelling:
  - Mandatory: A `sig:*`, `lang:*` or `docs:*` to determine (co)ownership of the
    issue:
    - A `sig:*` label if the issue is related to content or a question that is
      co-owned by a SIG (e.g. a question around the Collector will be labelled
      `sig:collector`).
    - A `lang:*` label if the issue is related to content or a question that is
      related to a specific localization.
    - A `docs:*` label if the issue is related to content or a question that is
      solely owned by the docs team (SIG Comms):
      - `docs`
      - `docs:admin`
      - `docs:accessibility`
      - `docs:analytics-and-seo`
      - `docs:IA`
      - `docs:blog`
      - `docs:cleanup/refactoring`
      - `docs:upstream`, `docs:upstream/docsy`
      - `docs:javascript`
      - `docs:mobile`
      - `docs:registry`
      - `docs:ux`
  - Mandatory: A `triage:*` label:
    - `triage:accepted`, `triage:accepted:needs-pr`
    - `triage:deciding`, `triage:deciding:blocked`, `triage:deciding:needs-info`
    - `triage:rejected`, `triage:rejected:duplicate`, `triage:rejected:invalid`,
      `triage:rejected:wontfix`
  - Mandatory: Set the "type" of the issue as follows:
    - issue type `bug` for bugs
    - issue type `enhancement` for feature requests
    - label `type:question` for questions
    - label `type:copyedit` for copy edits
    - move an the issue to "discussions" if it seems to be a non workable
      open-ended conversation
  - Optional: An estimate label if applicable:
    - `e0-minutes`
    - ...
    - `e4-months`
  - Optional (and only set by maintainers): A priority label:
    - `p0-critical`
    - `p1-high`
    - `p2-medium`
    - `p3-low`
  - Optional: One of the following special tags:
    - `good first issue`
    - `help wanted`
    - `contribfest`
    - `maintainers only`
    - `forever`
    - `stale`
- Automation will mark an issue in `triage:deciding` with `triage:followup` for
  re-triage after 14 days of inactivitiy on an issue. A `triage:followup` label
  should be removed within 7 days. Pinging the participants and removing the
  label is sufficient activity.

### PRs

- PRs must have a linked issue labelled `triage:accepted` with the following
  exceptions:
  - Automatic PRs
  - hotfixes by maintainers/approvers
- Automation will ensure that PRs are
  [labelled](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/blob/main/.github/component-label-map.yml)
  and
  [assigned](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/blob/main/.github/component-owners.yml)
  to the appropriate co-owning SIG or localization team.
- PRs should have the same co-ownership labels as issues
- If the PR is co-owned by a SIG, this group is responsible for doing a first
  review to ensure that the content is technically correct.
- If the PR is co-owned by a language team, this group is responsible for
  ensuring that the translation of the content is correct.
- The main responsibility of docs team is to ensure, that the PR is in line with
  the overall goals of the project, is put in the right place within the
  structure and follows the style and content guides of the project.
- PRs which are missing something to be merged, should be labeled accordingly:
  - `missing:cla`
  - `missing:docs-approval`
  - `missing:sig-approval`
  - `blocked`
- Automation will mark a PR as `stale` to request a re-review after 21 days of
  inactivity. A `stale` label should be removed within 14 days. Pinging the
  participants and removing the label is sufficient activity.
- PRs are never auto-closed.

## Code reviews

### General

- If the PR branch is `out-of-date with the base branch`, they do not need to be
  updated continuously: every update triggers all the PR CI checks to be run!
  It's often enough to update them before merging.
- A PR by non-maintainers should **never** update git sub modules. This happens
  by accident from time to time. Let the PR author know that they should not
  worry about it, we will fix this before merging, but in the future they should
  make sure that they work from an up-to-date fork.
- If the contributor is having trouble signing the CLA or used the wrong email
  by mistake in one of their commits, ask them to fix the issue or rebase the
  pull request. Worst case scenario, close and re-open the PR to trigger a new
  CLA check.
- Words unknown to cSpell can be added to the ignore list in one of three
  places:
  - **Page front matter**: Generally preferred for one-off words that are
    unlikely to appear elsewhere. See [Spell Checking][].
  - **Locale dictionary**: Preferred for words likely to be used across multiple
    pages in the same language, such as `.cspell/en-words.txt`.
  - **Shared (all-locales) word list**: `.cspell/all-words.txt`. Preferred for
    terms whose spelling is valid across all languages, such as product names or
    people's names. See [Spell Checking][].

  Reviewers and approvers can determine if the placement is appropriate during
  the review process.

[Spell Checking]: ../style-guide/#spell-checking

### Co-owned PRs

PRs with changes to documentation co-owned by a SIG (collector, demo,
language-specific...) should aim for two approvals: one by a docs approver and
one by a SIG approver:

- Doc approver label such PRs with `sig:<name>` and tag the SIG `-approvers`
  group on that PR.
- After a doc approver has reviewed and approved the PR, they can add the label
  [`sig-approval-missing`](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/labels/sig-approval-missing).
  This signals to the SIG that they need to handle the PR.
- If no SIG approval is given within a certain grace period (two weeks in
  general, but may be less in urgent cases), docs maintainer may use their own
  judgement to merge that PR.

### PRs from bots

PRs created by bots can be merged by the following practice:

- PRs that auto-update versions in the registry can be fixed, approved and
  merged immediately.
- PRs that auto-update the versions of SDKs, zero-code instrumentations or the
  collector can be approved and merged except the corresponding SIG signals that
  merging should be postponed.
- PRs that auto-update the version of any specification often require updates to
  scripts for the CI checks to pass. In that case
  [@chalin](https://github.com/chalin/) will handle the PR. Otherwise those PRs
  can as well be approved and merged except the corresponding SIG signals that
  merging should be postponed.

### Translation PRs

PRs with changes to translations should aim for two approvals: one by a docs
approver and one by a translation approver. Similar practices apply as suggested
for the co-owned PRs.

## Merging PRs

The following workflow can be applied by maintainers to merge PRs:

- Make sure that a PR has all approvals and all CI checks pass.
- If the branch is out-of-date, rebase update it via the GitHub UI.
- The update will trigger all CI checks to run again, wait for them to pass or
  execute a script like the following to make it happen in the background:

  ```shell
  export PR=; gh pr checks ${PR} --watch && gh pr merge ${PR} --squash
  ```

## Specification PRs and integration branches {#spec-integration-branches}

The website continuously integrates unreleased changes from the
[opentelemetry-specification][] and [semantic-conventions][] repositories. Two
scheduled workflows ([details][ci-section]) run daily and keep a draft
"integration" PR current with the next dev version:

- Branch pattern: `otelbot/spec-integration-vX.Y.Z-dev` and
  `otelbot/semconv-integration-vX.Y.Z-dev`.
- List of live branches: [spec][spec-branches] · [semconv][semconv-branches].

[opentelemetry-specification]:
  https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification
[semantic-conventions]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions
[ci-section]: /site/build/ci-workflows/#spec-integration-branches
[spec-branches]:
  https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/branches/all?query=spec-integration
[semconv-branches]:
  https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/branches/all?query=semconv-integration

### Spec / semconv SIG maintainers

Just before cutting a release:

1. Find the latest integration branch for your spec at the links given in the
   previous section (e.g. `otelbot/spec-integration-v1.56.0-dev`).
2. Open the associated PR (linked from the branch page).
3. Trigger a fresh run of the corresponding workflow to pick up your latest
   changes:
   - [update-spec-integration-branch.yml][]
   - [update-semconv-integration-branch.yml][]
4. If the PR checks are green, the spec is safe to release. If not, ping
   `@open-telemetry/docs-maintainers` so we can address breakage before the
   release goes out.

### Comms SIG maintainers

Throughout the month, regularly check the integration PRs and commit incremental
fixes to keep their CI checks green. Catching breakage early — while the
upstream change set is still small — is much easier than firefighting on release
day.

[update-spec-integration-branch.yml]:
  https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/actions/workflows/update-spec-integration-branch.yml
[update-semconv-integration-branch.yml]:
  https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/actions/workflows/update-semconv-integration-branch.yml
