Three Years, 59 RFCs, One Vote: Bitol Graduates

Yesterday, Bitol officially graduated from the LF AI & Data Foundation. No caps thrown, no processional music. Just a unanimous TAC vote, a Governing Board vote, and about three years of unglamorous work finally paying off.

For those keeping score: Sandbox (September 2023) → Incubation (November 2024) → Graduated (now). It’s the data-standards equivalent of going from “promising intern” to “senior partner,” except nobody gave us a corner office.

Remember What We Had to Prove?

Graduation isn’t a participation trophy. LF AI & Data’s lifecycle rules stack Graduation on top of everything Incubation already demanded of us. To graduate, we also had to clear every one of these:

• Code contributions from at least five organizations. We’re at least 11: Actian, Entropy Data, Data Catering, Pickle, enChoice, Alliander, Agile Lab, Datashift, Protective Life, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and ALH Gruppe. ✔
• 1,000+ GitHub stars. As of today, ODCS crosses the bar alone at 1,053. Add ODPS’s 113, and we’re at 1,166 combined. ✔
• The OpenSSF Best Practices Gold Badge. Silver at Incubation in 2024, Gold now. Held and maintained, not just earned once and forgotten. ✔
• 12 straight months of substantial commit activity. 480+ commits merged across bitol-io repos in the last year, active every single month. ✔
• At least one collaboration with another LF AI & Data hosted project. We were asked for one. We have two: Egeria and Unity Catalog both embed ODCS natively, with Unity Catalog embedding ODPS as well. ✔
• A technical lead appointed to represent Bitol on the LF AI & Data Technical Advisory Council. That’s going to be me to start with. ✔
• The vote itself: two-thirds of the TAC required, then the Governing Board. Not a simple majority. Two-thirds. Try getting two-thirds of any group to agree on where to get lunch. But that’s fine; we got a unanimous vote. ✔

Every bullet above is a small mountain. Clear all of them and “Graduated” actually means something, instead of being a label someone slaps on a GitHub repo.

How Hard the TSC Worked, and How Proud We Are

None of this happened by accident. Since Incubation, this community shipped ODCS v3.1.0, took ODPS from a 0.9.0 first draft to a full 1.0.0 release, and pushed 59 RFCs through public debate, which is a polite way of saying: a lot of very smart, very busy people found time for Bitol on top of their day jobs, repeatedly, for three years straight.

The numbers back it up (numbers from our recent study ending May 2026):

• Organizations adopting ODCS and ODPS went from 9 to 114 in fourteen months. Roughly 13x.
• Employees touched by that adoption went from 1.1 million to 4.5 million, a 4x jump.
• Countries represented went from 3 to 21, a 7x spread, across 15 sectors.
• GitHub stars went from 313 at Incubation to 1,053 as of today, better than 3x growth.
• 92 contributors all-time, 30 of them committing in just the last 12 months.
• 61% of organizations surveyed now report using data contracts, and 41% of data contract practitioners specifically use ODCS (BARC, 2026).

We also, somewhere along the way, wrote the industry’s working definition of a data product. It’s on Wikipedia now. Nobody warns you that’s a milestone too, but it is.

That is the part I am proudest of. Standards work is thankless by design. Nobody claps when an RFC finally merges after twenty rounds of debate about field naming (sic!). But that grind, argument by argument, PR by PR, conference talk by conference talk (40+ of them since 2023, plus four books along the way), is exactly what turned a nine-company experiment into a standard running in 21 countries. The TSC didn’t just write a spec. They built the muscle memory of a real open governance body, and the Foundation noticed.

Thank You, TSC. Thank You, TAC.

To the Bitol Technical Steering Committee: thank you for the reviews, the disagreements, the Slack threads at odd hours, and the refusal to ship something half-baked just to hit a date. This milestone is yours more than mine.

To the LF AI & Data Technical Advisory Council and Governing Board: thank you for the scrutiny. A rubber stamp wouldn’t have meant anything. A unanimous vote does.

The People Who Made It Happen

The TSC meets monthly (third Tuesday, max two members per company), and the Working Group beneath it meets twice a week, plus whenever something’s on fire. Twelve voting members, chaired by yours truly:

Eleven companies, three flavors of stakeholder (users, consultants, vendors), nobody steering this thing alone. That’s the whole point of open governance.

We’d also be lying if we didn’t tip our hats to the TSC alumni who laid the groundwork before graduation was even on the table: Dieter Wachters, Bart Vandekerckhove, Tom Baeyens, Georges Kopp, Sandro Pugliese, and Todd Nemanich. You built the foundation the rest of us graduated on.

Bitol is now a graduated project of the LF AI & Data Foundation. ODCS and ODPS just got a lot harder to ignore. Come build with us: bitol.io.