Community Governance / Open Foundation Creation or Donation

[gerred]

Pre-submission Checklist

• I have verified this would not be more appropriate as a feature request in a specific repository
• I have searched existing discussions to avoid duplicates

Your Idea

MCP is exciting. There is a lot of momentum around it, and it's because it's a very clean abstraction for identifying the control flows and action ownership of different actors in an agentic system.

Having seen the growth of projects across the Bytecode Alliance, ASF, CNCF, LF, and OpenSSF, I think this MCP is an excellent opportunity to start working on open governance. A significant theme of open source software in the past years, from foundations to software licensing, has been about vendor lock-in and ownership. In fact, multi-vendor collaboration can often be a requirement for usage in some enterprises or in secure systems, and healthy ecosystem. There is documentation as well around https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3377811.3380376 of competitors in collaborative open source ecosystems.

I am an emeritus lead/bootstrap chair of CNCF TAG Contributor Strategy which focuses on these types of issues: https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/main/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/template-graduation-application.md#contributors-and-community.

I'd love to kick the discussion off as this is a roadmap item for the MCP team. I have no proposals for now. I would note there's many possible structures, and in general I believe that the Bytecode Alliance structure (or even more lightweight) would be a good way for many to participate and grow MCP (even if it's early but growing fast). Tooling, protocols, standards, and open research/working groups for agentic systems.

Thanks so much for being open to this.

Scope

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Features
• Documentation
• Developer Experience
• Other

[gerred]

Note @dsp-ant commented elsewhere:

For me the important part is that engagement comes in form of clear proposals and PRs. Happy to hear what people want in terms of governance, but fundamentally it’s a project that will be governed by the people that contribute. Maybe my experience from working on PHP and Mercurial shows.

I FULLY agree with this. The intent is to create a neutral space for contributors. I use the others as models to describe the successful parts of vendor neutrality and open foundations for protocols and tooling advancing the state. The references I'm using are just that, and not a guide or suggestion.

[gerred]

It seems like there's a lot of interest in this! As I've done this work before, I am gathering people in a new Discord for something, hopefully like the Bytecode Alliance, I'm right now dubbing the Agentic Alliance. It could be a collaborative place - really the flow should BE that there is a foundation, and it is appealing for Anthropic to donate the project to the community foundation, they may submit it for review.

I'll keep this open to continue the discussion because I am deeply interested in this!

[2404589803]

I'm currently working on developing the Go SDK and C SDK for MCP. Is there a Discord channel where I can communicate with others?

[tadasant]

@2404589803 there's a discussion regarding Discord/Reddit communities here: https://github.com/orgs/modelcontextprotocol/discussions/99

Curious to hear whether @gerred is spinning up another one as well though

[gerred]

That should go in the existing Model Context Protocol Discord for sure - we aren't creating an alternate community for MCP itself. The foundation discussions we're current bootstrapping, I'm thinking and as we're discussing in wg-bootstrap, would be to make the Agentic Alliance (pending name) an attractive place for the MCP community to donate into a vendor neutral collaborative space.

I'm happy to post a link if asked to that Discord for interested parties, but that is specifically scoped to this discussion issue. :)

[tadasant]

I'd be interested in following along with that discussion if you're open to sharing the link :)

[gerred]

Absolutely! Here you go!