When implementing API governance a lot of attention gets paid to the technical surrounding the API, while investing in the team behind an API will also help standardize and deliver more consistent and high quality APIs. People tend to take more pride in their work when they are acknowledged and showcased for that work, which can be easily baked into the overall API governance process, schema, and rules to help automate the elevation of teams behind APIs using these mechanisms.
- OpenAPI Contact - Ensuring the team behind an API is always updated in the OpenAPI definition which will show in documentation and tooling.
- **Team Profiles - Consider how you can add more robust team profiles including images, descriptions, as well as links and communication channels.
- Blog Posts - Encourage teams to publish short and medium form stories with the deliver of new APIs, and alongside updates to existing APIs.
- Video Tutorials - Work with teams to produce video tutorials of how to use an API, and the work that went into making it a standardized solution.
- Ratings - Points can easily be added to API governance rules and then added or subtracting from individual APIs, but also applied at the team level.
Elevating the visibility of the team behind an API, whether it is internal, partner facing, or publicly available to 3rd-party helps improve the accountability and standardization involved with delivering APIs and governing the evolution of them. The more APIs fade into a general pool of legacy APIs without any true owner or steward, the more chances it will also not comply with API governance, and contribute to the API sprawl and chaos that enterprises struggle with today.
