As Lance continues to mature and its adoption accelerates, we believe it’s time to establish clear pathways for community involvement and leadership that reflect our collaborative, inclusive values.
Building the Future Together: Introducing Lance Community Governance
Over the last three years, Lance has created a truly unique community where data infrastructure engineers and AI/ML engineers come together to make lakehouse architectures work in the AI era. As Lance continues to mature and its adoption accelerates, we believe it’s time to establish clear pathways for community involvement and leadership that reflect our collaborative, inclusive values.
Why Governance?
What started as an idea to develop a better format for machine learning and AI has become the fastest-growing open format with a vibrant community spanning hundreds of contributors and dozens of companies. With this growth, it’s important to ensure that no single entity can unilaterally make critical decisions. Our consensus-driven model ensures that any PMC member can veto a proposal, requiring community consensus to move forward.
Our Philosophy: A Community That Values All Contributions
One of the core principles of our governance is that contributions may come in many forms, and all of them are valuable. Bug reports, feature requests, documentation, design work, organizing meetups, giving talks, and supporting users on Discord all count as meaningful contributions. Roles and permissions are separated so we can recognize all types of contributions while distributing responsibilities based on strengths and interests.
To reflect this philosophy, we’ve established a three-tier governance structure: Contributors, Maintainers, and Project Management Committee (PMC). This structure resembles that of the projects in the Apache Software Foundation, and what we described above is very much in line with the Apache Way and “Community over Code” spirit - which is not surprising if you check out the backgrounds of Lance maintainers and PMC members 😉.
What About LanceDB?
Architecturally, Lance remains a pure format specification with its core SDK and connectors, while LanceDB is a full lakehouse implementation built on top of the Lance format. To make this distinction clear, Lance now has its own website, GitHub organization, and Discord server separate from LanceDB, which continues to maintain its own ecosystem for its user community.
Get Involved
We’re excited about this next chapter for Lance. If you’re interested in getting more involved, here’s how:
