Sustaining OpenTelemetry: Moving from dependency management to stewardship

Bloomberg is partnering with CNCF to run a structured mentorship cohort (April–June 2026) focused on contributing to OpenTelemetry. The initiative, called 'Sustaining Open Source,' addresses the gap between passive dependency management and active stewardship by embedding 30–45 Bloomberg engineers into the OpenTelemetry project with guided onboarding, weekly office hours with maintainers, and a focus on high-leverage maintenance tasks like triage, docs, tests, and SDK work. The model was previously validated with the pandas project in partnership with NumFOCUS and NVIDIA. The broader argument is that as AI increases code volume and regulatory pressure on supply chain integrity grows, organizations need to invest in upstream contributor capacity—not just scan for CVEs.