diff --git a/text/0123-improve-span-status-api.md b/text/0123-improve-span-status-api.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..fca97ce90
--- /dev/null
+++ b/text/0123-improve-span-status-api.md
@@ -0,0 +1,303 @@
+# Improve Span Status API
+
+Allow the Span Status API to represent more kinds of status
+
+## Motivation
+
+Right now OpenTelemetry Status is defined as an enumeration of gRPC status 
+codes. Although I couldn't find design criteria written down for this API
+I fear it is too narrowly defined to be useful across the full breadth of
+scenarios OpenTelemetry targets.
+
+OpenTelemetry allows Spans to be created to represent any operation, including
+those which don't involve communication with another component (Kind =
+Internal). These underlying operations can have native status representations
+from a particular domain or a language such as POSIX status codes, HRESULTs,
+many variations of exceptions, error messages, HTTP status, or gRPC status.
+However to capture the status as part of an OpenTelemetry span it must first be
+mapped to something in OpenTelemetry's object model and this mapping has the
+potential to create a few problems:
+
+- **Inconsistency** - If the mapping from native representation to
+OpenTelemetry representation isn't well-defined then API users or SDK
+implementations are unlikely to choose the same mapping. This makes collected
+data hard to work with because it can no longer be treated uniformly.
+- **Loss of fidelity** - Mapping from a status representation that
+distinguishes a large number of different results to one that only
+distinguishes a few is inherently lossy. This prevents users from isolating
+different status results they care about. It can also prevent UI from showing
+useful status information because users don't relate to the reduced
+representation and the transformation isn't reversible.
+- **Conversion difficulty** - If the conversions are non-trivial then they
+are unlikely to be implemented correctly or perhaps at all. Past feedback
+suggests end users want to spend little to no effort on this task. SDK
+implementers may be more diligent but are constrained to native status
+representations that are known a-priori.
+
+These are challenges for any design of the status API, not solely the current
+one. We will need to evaluate these issues as a matter of degree and make a
+judgement call about what is sufficient.
+
+### Goals
+
+In order to determine what status information is useful we first need a common
+understanding what we expect the collected data to be used for. These are
+tasks I anticipate tool vendors and end-users would like to be possible with
+OpenTelemetry status information:
+
+1. **Viewing** - Developers diagnosing a specific distributed trace want to
+understand the status of spans that occurred while it ran. To do this they want
+to see status information annotated in the trace, ideally with progressive
+levels of detail as the focus of investigation narrows. The viewed status
+information should be easy to correlate back to the domain that generated it
+and diagnostically useful.
+
+2. **Searching/Filtering** - Developers suspect a particular status condition
+might be occurring due to customer feedback, some behavior they observed
+locally, in another trace, or perhaps code review. They want to search
+collected telemetry to determine if and how often that status condition
+occurs. If it occurs they want to explore example traces producing it to
+better understand when it manifests and how it impacts their system. The
+search terms should be intuitive given the developers initial knowledge
+about the status condition they are searching for and the domain it arose from.
+
+3. **Grouping and metrics** - Developers monitoring a service want to
+understand what kinds of status conditions are occurring and how frequently.
+To do this they want the monitoring tool to provide UI that buckets results
+into categories and show the top categories ranked by count of occurrence.
+They may also want metrics that track category counts over time to identify
+trends and deviations from the trend. Many useful groupings are based on
+sharing a common problem symptom or common root cause, but other more coarse
+groupings may be useful in trend analysis. At the most coarse spans can be
+divided into some definition of "successful" and "failed" but there is no
+consensus on how some status results should be bucketed (for example http
+4xx results).
+
+### Scope
+
+I hope to define only the tracing API here, not an SDK API nor a wire
+protocol. I assume that a simple SDK API will follow relatively automatically
+if we first have agreement on the tracing API and OpenTelemetry can still be
+successful in an initial release without having standardized a wire protocol.
+
+The operation represented by a span might be composed of sub-operations (for
+example a function that calls into other lower level functions) and each of
+those sub-operations might have a notion of status or error. If those
+sub-operations aren't represented with a child span then it is out of scope
+how their status is captured. 
+
+## Explanation
+
+#### Data representation of Span Status
+
+We should aim for representations that require minimal-to-no end-developer
+translation effort from the native representation and capture at least the key
+numeric/string data developers are likely to search for or relate to. I suggest
+status is this set of information:
+
+1. StatusType - The name of the type of error such as "HTTP", "gRPC",
+"LanguageException", "HRESULT", "POSIX", or "ErrorMessage". The list is
+end-user-extensible but common status type names should be standardized.
+(Perhaps there is already some standardization we could borrow?)
+2. StatusData - A discriminated union of:
+   - An integer, a string, or a tuple of integer and string. These options can
+be used for:
+     - Enumerated status codes: For example an http status code could be
+represented as 404, "Not Found", or both. In the case of common status codes
+OpenTelemetry SDK or backend could optionally assist in filling out the
+remainder of a partially specified enumeration value. For enumerations that
+aren't well-known the community of users is responsible for determining any
+conventions.
+     - Free-form error messages
+   - Exception object - whatever the SDK language's default exception datatype
+is, if it has one.
+   - void
+3. SuccessHint - An optional boolean that represents the span author's best
+guess whether this status represents a successful or failed operation, however
+they choose to define those terms. For well-known status types I'd suggest the
+hint be ignored but for user-defined status types this is likely the only clue
+whether the span should be surfaced in a UI as being abnormal or failed.
+
+Although UI creators are free experiment with how the data is presented I
+expect most presentations would either be the StatusData alone, or the
+StatusData qualified with the StatusType and some separator character. For
+example StatusData alone might create names like "FileNotFoundException",
+"503", "E_FAIL (0x80004005)", "SyntaxError on line 405: Did you forget a
+semicolon?", and "BadQuery".
+
+Exceptions could have progressive level of detail drilling into messages,
+stack traces, inner exceptions, links to source, etc if the exporter serialized
+sufficient data but how and whether that occurs is out-of-scope in this design. 
+
+#### API to capture this data
+
+I would suggest an API called Span.SetStatus(...) that takes all the arguments
+above, and optionally overloads or default parameters that make common calls
+easier. For example in C#:
+
+````C#
+void SetStatus(Exception spanException, string statusType = "LanguageException", bool? successHint = null);
+void SetStatus(string enumNameOrMessage, string statusType = "ErrorMessage", bool? successHint = null);
+void SetStatus(int enumValue, string statusType, bool? successHint = null );
+void SetStatus(int enumValue, string enumName, string statusType, bool? successHint = null);
+void SetStatus(string statusType, bool? successHint);
+````
+
+
+
+## Internal details
+
+I expect a basic and reasonable implementation would be to define fields on the
+Span object, set them in the setter and then implement some getter for the
+exporters to use. A second possibility is to store the data into attributes or
+events. The choice of storage may have some modest effects on memory usage
+but primarily I expect the choice would be driven by the SDK API we want to
+read stored data back.
+
+It is also possible for the SDK to destructure the Exception data into simpler
+serializable types though I'd expect serialization is typically the domain of
+the exporter and there is a fair amount of policy involved in terms of what
+data is captured and how it is formatted for transport. There are definite
+risks that the end-to-end scenario will be less functional or less performant
+if SDKs intercede here.
+
+In some languages storing an exception with traceback could be very
+memory intensive. Python prevents locals in the callstack from being
+GC'ed. One suggestion is to use a synchronous callback to the exporter
+allowing it process the data immediately in some way that would lower
+the memory usage. For example the exporter could indicate the
+exception could be disposed after optionally extracting a fraction of the
+information to serialize.
+
+
+## Trade-offs and mitigations
+
+As mentioned in the motivation section, the issues of inconsistency, loss of
+fidelity and conversion difficulty are all on a sliding scale. I expect this
+design improves each of these issues at the expensive of some increased
+object-model/API complexity. Making the OpenTelemetry status representation
+more expressive also could cause inconsistency problems for the opposite reason
+- now there might be multiple reasonable representations for a status and the
+user becomes unclear which one to pick. In general I expect this to be mitigated
+with documented conventions, API defaults, and the potentially canonicalizing
+data anywhere in the processing pipeline. 
+
+One place I neglected to go further was defining additional types of error data
+format beyond string/int/Exception. This might encapsulate things such as
+key/value pairs (ala structured logging) or more complex or niche status types
+(COM IErrorInfo). There is nothing inherently problematic with them but I felt
+the increased expressiveness was getting diminishing returns. One mitigation to
+key/value pair data in particular would be to put auxilliary data in the span
+attributes using some convention, for example "Error.UserName"="Bob" might be
+used together with an error message string "Failed to find user {UserName}".
+Another mitigation might be adding language specific overloads that handle
+additional error types.
+
+The current proposal only gives one string which can be used either for a 
+freeform message or a textual status code. Adding a 2nd string to the
+StatusData would allow both to be collected side by side. This is another example of
+increasing expressivity at the cost of some complexity. I'd be happy to see
+this added if the community agreed.
+
+If all the data collected by the API is transmitted to the back-end this also
+increases the size of transmitted telemetry, but the exporter authors always
+retain the freedom to drop or reduce any information they don't believe is
+valuable with potentially a slight
+
+## Prior art and alternatives
+
+#### Prior discussion
+
+There have been a few past attempts to make improvements here:
+
+- [open-telemetry/oteps#69](https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/pull/69)
+- [#427](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/pull/427)
+- [#432](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/pull/432)
+- [#521](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/pull/521)
+- [#599](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/issues/599)
+- https://gitter.im/open-telemetry/error-events-wg
+
+There are also some links to further prior art within those links, sorry
+I didn't organize it all nicely here : )
+
+#### Alternatives
+
+**Status information using logging** - It is possible to collect status and
+error message via log messages and correlate it to a span via trace context.
+While I have no objection to improved logging capabilities or better
+integration between distributed tracing and logging I don't believe this is
+a problem that distributed tracing should abdicate for various reasons:
+
+- Logging isn't a simple or cheap dependency to take in the implementation.
+While OpenTelemetry may solidify a logging offering for API and SDK components,
+an end-to-end scenario still requires snooping the log stream to determine
+relevant messages for a given span. Regardless whether this is done
+client-side, at the database or in the UI layer it potentially involves
+performance overhead of handling an order of magnitude more data.
+- It requires establishing conventions that designate which log message
+represents 'the status' for a Span rather than one of potentially many results
+or errors that were recorded during the Span's duration. This likely means this
+status is a special case on the logging API if it isn't a special case on the
+distributed trace API.
+- I expect developers both at the time they are emitting trace data and when
+viewing that trace data would find it is idiomatic to  include the status of
+the Span's workload together with the description of the Span. Identifying
+failed or abnormal spans is a typical APM operation.
+
+**Closed vs. open-ended status descriptions** - We could make status
+represented by a fixed set of options such as the current gRPC codes
+or any larger/different set. It likely is simpler for tools consuming
+the data to only operate on fixed options and it is pleasant to imagine that
+all (or most) status results will be reasonably categorized into the fixed
+list. However I do not expect most users to take up the responsibility of
+mapping their status results if OpenTelemetry/back-end tools don't provide
+a clear representation. Instead these users will not set status or choose
+options that are generic and inconsistent rendering the data useless to
+everyone. For a fixed list to work I believe we either have to curate a very
+large list of options or accept that significant portions of the developer
+audience will not find the status representation useful.
+
+**API using attribute semantic conventions** - It is also possible to do this
+via semantic conventions on attributes and although I think the strongly typed
+API is preferable I don't have that strong of an opinion. Semantic conventions
+are likely to have higher performance overhead, higher risk of error in key
+names and are less discoverable/refactorable in IDEs. The advantages are that
+there is some past precedent for doing this specific to http codes and new
+conventions can be added easily. If we go semantic conventions it does imply
+that Exception becomes a type that can be directly passed as an argument to
+SetAttribute(). Requiring the user to destructure the exception into a list of
+key value pairs would be overly onerous and error-prone for a common usage
+scenario. If desired the SDK or exporter could destructure it, but that can be
+determined independently from API design and I'd like to keep it out of scope.
+
+**API using Span event semantic conventions** - Most of the rationale for attribute semantic
+conventions also applies here, events are effectively another key-value store
+mechanism. The timestamp that is attached to an event appears to hold little
+value as status is probably produced at the same approximate time the span end
+timestamp is recorded. Similar to attribute conventions it sounds like there is
+precedent for storing some errors as events.
+
+**Move the API to a non-core package** - It is possible to have the Tracing
+API expose status using Attribute or Event APIs, and then have a 2nd library
+that exposes a strongly-typed API that converts the status information into
+attrbute/event updates. This adds some complexity over a strongly typed API
+declared directly on Span but if we identify this as an area that needs to be
+more decoupled/versionable than other Span tracing APIs perhaps it would be
+valuable.
+
+**Represent an error message in addition to a string error name**
+
+## Open questions
+
+1. Although I specified that common status types could be given standardized
+names, I didn't define what that list was. We would need to define what
+criteria makes a status type common enough to be on the list and maintain it
+over time. 
+
+2. Above the design mentioned that the SDK might fill in the name or integer
+value of a well-known status code when only one of the two was specified by a
+user. We'd have to decide if that is functionality we want, and which values
+are included in mapping tables.
+3. I left the SDK API out-of-scope, but we will need a way to retrieve the
+stored data via the SDK before adding data to span has any value in an
+end-to-end scenario.