# This Town Needs a Sheriff, and I Am One of the Deputies > Source: > Published: 2026-06-24 06:00:00+00:00 # This Town Needs a Sheriff, and I Am One of the Deputies I have been thinking about open standards for a long time. It is kind of baked into what I do. OpenFeature, flagd, CNCF — most of my open source work lives in that space where the community agrees on a contract so that the ecosystem can grow around it. So when the Agentic AI Foundation announced their ambassador program, it felt like the right moment to get involved. The agentic AI space right now feels like the wild west. A new framework every week. New concepts, new acronyms, new opinions about the right way to build. Some of it is genuinely good thinking. A lot of it is noise. And it is very hard to tell which is which when everything arrives at the same velocity. I think about the early container ecosystem. Before CNCF there was a similar energy — exciting, chaotic, and deeply fragmented. What the foundation did was not slow things down. It gave the community a place to converge. Project maturity indicators. Vendor-neutral governance. A landscape that helped you navigate. Not a monopoly on ideas, but a shared ground beneath them. That is what the agentic space is missing. AAIF is the institution stepping into that gap — the foundation trying to bring order without killing the energy. This town needs a sheriff. And I want to be a deputy. MCP, Goose, AGENTS.md — these are early signals that the community wants shared contracts, not just shared enthusiasm. I already work with most of these technologies. Goose is still on my todo list, admittedly. But the direction is right. What I am most curious about is not the tools themselves. It is what open standards enable downstream. In the CNCF world, standards did not just make tooling interoperable. They made teams interoperable. A platform engineer moving between companies could reason about the stack. A new hire could orient faster. Shared vocabulary reduced the tax of starting from scratch every time. I think the same thing will happen here — eventually. The agentic space will settle. Some approaches will consolidate. Others will fade. What survives will probably look more like protocols than products. AAIF being a Linux Foundation project is not a small thing. It signals seriousness about governance. About longevity. About the difference between a project with a roadmap and a framework with a VC behind it. I do not know exactly what the ambassadorship will produce yet. One public contribution a month. Talks, content, community. That is the commitment, and I am happy to make it. What I do know is that the conversations worth having right now — about how teams work with agents, about what shared understanding looks like before the agent runs, about what we are actually optimizing for — need a place to happen. Not just on Twitter. Not just in individual blog posts. In a community with enough shared vocabulary to make the arguments productive. I am looking forward to working with a lot of talented and inspiring people to build exactly that.