Participating In The OpenAPI Feedback Loop

When you are an individual in a sea of tech giants, and startups who are moving technical conversations forward, it can be easy to just sit back, stay quiet, and go with the flow. As a single person, it feels like our voice will not be heard, or even listened to when it comes to moving forward standards and specifications like the OpenAPI, but in reality, every single voice that speaks up is important, and has the potential to bring a new perspective regarding what the future should hold when it comes to the roadmap.

If you are building any services or tooling that supports version 2.0 of the OpenAPI specification and will be looking to evolve your services or tooling to support version 3.0, you need to make sure and share your views. No matter where you are in the development of your tooling, planning or even deployment, you should make sure you gather and share your thoughts with the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI)--they have a form for tooling developers to submit their feedback and details about what you are up to.

Whether or not you submit your OAI tooling and service plans via the form they provide, you should be also telling your story on your blog. You don't have to have a big audience for your blog, you just need to make sure and publicly share the details of your tools and services, and your perspective of both the OpenAPI 2.0 and 3.0 versions. If you tell your story on your blog, and Tweet or email a link to me, I may even craft my own story based on your perspective, and publish to API Evangelist, and put in my OpenAPI Toolbox. Storytelling around the specification plays an important role in helping evolve the specification, as well as help onboard other folks to the API specification format.

As the only individual in the OAI, I can testify that I often feel like my voice is too small to make a difference. This is not true. Whether it's via the Open API Github repo, directly via OpenAPI tooling feedback forms, or even via our blogs on the open Internet, your perspective on OpenAPI matters. Makes sure it gets heard--if you don't step up and share via one of these open channels, you are guaranteeing that you won't be heard, and your views definitely will not matter. Make sure you step up, there is too much at stake when it comes to API definitions right now