[Meta] Establish Public OpenSearch Release Process with Supporting Documentation

OpenSearch is a fast-growing community-contributed project consisting of multiple repositories with ~600 contributors who actively participate in the day-to-day growth of the project. The OpenSearch Project team has been hosting public meetings for some time, where community members can join the meetings and actively participate in the development activities alongside the maintainers. The release activities, operations, and feature discussions, however, are primarily driven by privileged organization members with domain knowledge not fully transparent to the community. As an open source project, it is imperative that OpenSearch move towards a fully transparent release process that can be jointly owned or participated by any member of the OpenSearch Maintainer community. This includes release planning, and concrete tasks needed to build, stage, test, and release the production ready artifacts. This meta issue captures the process and howTo documents needed to enable any OpenSearch maintainer to participate in (or drive) the OpenSearch release cycle in a fully transparent way.

• Document Top-Level Formal Release Process
• Document communication templates for soliciting community volunteers
• Document technical steps for Feature Freezing the ecosystem
• Document technical steps for creating release candidates (RC)
• Document technical and communication steps for integration, backwards compatibility, smoke, and performance testing the release candidate with the community
• Document technical steps for staging the RC
• Document technical steps for official release of the RC artifacts
• Document post release activities (e.g., announcements, PR, social media)

Start by reviewing the checklist in this issue and the linked public meeting context. Define the release-process documentation needed for planning, feature freezing, RC creation, testing, staging, official release, and post-release communication; done means each listed activity has transparent technical and communication guidance.