governance/CHAIR.rst

TC Chair Responsibilities

Note

This document is maintained as a simple text file, outside of the published governance document, because it is meant to be used for shared notes rather than as an official "guide to being TC chair".

General

• Keep the Board informed of important decisions
  • email the board chair and secretary with brief summaries of decisions, linking to the public discussion (e.g., resuming meetings, election outcome, etc.)
• Keep the TC informed of important Board actions
  • attend board meetings when possible
  • follow board discussions on the mailing list(s)
  • report useful information back to the TC
• Manage formal TC meetings
  • maintain the agenda in the wiki https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/TechnicalCommittee
• Review proposals to the openstack/governance repo (see below)
• Coordinate the agenda for joint leadership meetings with the board (see below)
• Send weekly update emails to openstack-discuss (see below)

Each Cycle

• Manage the initiative tracker
  • Prepare release tracker etherpad (During PTG), Example: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/tc-xena-tracker
  • Update the etherpad link in the wiki https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Technical_Committee_Tracker
• Check on the active goals and, if there is no active goal, then ensure that 2 TC members are signed up to manage the goal selection process.
• Ensure PTI and testing runtime update is done.
• Election planning
  • During PTG or at the start of cycle, select a TC member who is not standing for [re]election to serve as election liaison and point of contact for the next election.
  • Encourage the TC members that are not standing for [re]election to help as the election officials.
  • During R-9 week, check "PTL and TC elections".
  • Ensure PTL and TC election schedule is prepared as per schedule mentioned in https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html

Around TC elections

During the election period all current TC members continue to serve, even if their term is up and they are not running again. Committee membership changes when the election results are published.

When the election results are available, the outgoing chair should:

• welcome new and returning members. Make sure to send the TC onboarding guide to new members: https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/tc-guide.html
• update the tech-committee group in gerrit: https://review.opendev.org/#/admin/groups/205,members to remove members who should no longer be included and add new members
• encourage all TC members to vote on the patch prepared by the election officials with the new roster
• encourage all TC members to include the "[tc]" topic in their filter list for the openstack-discuss mailing list
• propose a patch to remove current chair and vice chair

After the election results are confirmed, the outgoing chair should:

• start the chair selection process by encouraging TC members to consider serving as chair and as per the process defined in https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/tc-chair-elections.html
• after a chair is selected, ensure they appear in the tech-committee-chair group in gerrit: https://review.opendev.org/#/admin/groups/206,members
• the outgoing chair should notify the board chair and secretary of the new TC membership and chair
• the outgoing chair should notify the community of the new chair

After the chair status is confirmed, the incoming chair should:

• Recruit a volunteer for vice chair and either propose or have them propose a patch nominating themselves for vice chair.

Governance Repo Patches

Different changes to openstack/governance use different voting rules. The chair is responsible for setting the topic for each change to the right value, and monitoring reviews so we know when it is OK to approve them or when they need to be rejected.

https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html#motions and https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/house-rules.html cover the voting rules

Running "tox -e check-review-status" builds a report to show the current status of each patch.

Keep in mind that even patches that are technically ready for approval may need to be held if there is strong minority dissent or someone key to the discussion hasn't had a chance to participate.

Remind TC members to review patches that are lingering without review.

Joint Leadership Meetings

The TC, Board of Directors, and leaders of other Foundation projects meet at the Summit or virtually to discuss topics of interest to the entire group.

Work with the Chair of the Board to build the agenda for the meeting, using input from the TC about topics that we want/need to discuss.

Weekly Update Emails

We use weekly email summaries of TC activity as a way to communicate with the rest of the community more easily. These are especially important for folks who do not have time to follow all of the discussions directly.

The summary should include:

• updates about ongoing discussions, including links to mailing list threads, IRC logs, and reviews
• a list of the top 1-2 of things TC members should be focusing on for the next week, such as reviews or mailing list threads

Foundation Annual Report

Near the end of each calendar year the OpenStack Foundation prepares an annual report. The TC is responsible for contributing a status update for the OpenStack project and community. The Foundation staff will contact the TC chair, who should either write the report or ensure that it is written.

See https://www.openstack.org/assets/reports/OpenStack-AnnualReport2017.pdf for one example report and https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/openstack-2018-annual-report for the working notes for the 2018 report.

Upstream Investment Opportunities

https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/upstream-investment-opportunities/index.html

Toward the end of each calendar year, invite sponsors of the current year's Upstream Investement Opportunities to repropose any relevant ones for the following year. Solicit new entries on the mailing list.

At the beginning of the new year, switch the index to point at the directory for the new year. (If no business cases have been approved yet, seed it with a symlink to the template - this can be removed once there are entries in the list.)