governance/reference/tc-guide.rst

It All Starts with a Technical Committee Election

You're either here because you are interested in being on the TC one day or because you are recently elected, either way: Thank You! We appreciate the interest and your desire to volunteer to help steer this big wonderful project!

Below is an outline of what you need to know about the duties of a Technical Committee member.

After the Election

Once the most recent TC election results are in, it is time to start organizing the committee for the next cycle.

The first step for the pre-existing TC members is to approve the patch prepared by the election officials to update the TC roster. This looks something like this: https://review.opendev.org/#/c/680356/

After the patch is merged, the TC is officially seated and we need to select a chair. If you are interested in being chair (see also CHAIR.rst in the governance repository) and propose a patch on reference/members.yaml to change your role: to chair. These chair nomination patches should be proposed within two weeks of the new members being seated.

After the chair is designated, candidates for vice chair should propose their candidacies within the week after the chair is seated. The candidate needs to propose a patch to add a vice-chair in reference/members.yaml.

General Info

Joining the TC can seem a little daunting, especially when you may already have responsibilities in a project team, SIG, or group. A large part of being on the TC is active communication to ensure each member is up-to-date on what's being discussed, issues that may have arisen, and what's coming up.

Other Documents

In addition to this document, there are three others you should read as a new TC member and reference throughout your term on the TC.

1.Technical Committee Charter 2.House Rules for openstack/governance repo 3.Role of the TC

Communication

As a TC member, we have two primary ways of communicating. Take a moment to ensure that your email filters are configured to ensure you see any messages on the mailing list with the '[tc]' topic tag. Please also join the '#openstack-tc' channel on IRC, and set a notification for the string 'tc-members'. There is no requirement to do this, but we recommend also setting a notification for a string with your name. This is also helpful for mentions in other channels if you are the tc-liaison to a specific project.

TC Project Liasions

Each project under OpenStack governance is assigned two TC members to act as liaisons. These liaisons should act as a bridge between that project and the TC, helping the project with governance concerns. You will be assigned a list of projects based on random selection if you don't set them yourself. You can pick your preferred projects yourself after you are seated by submitting a patch. This mechanical assignment of tc members as liaisons looks something like this: https://review.opendev.org/#/c/680386/.

Once you have been assigned your projects, the first work item for new and returning members is to talk to the projects for which you are a liaison. We recommend introducing yourself to the PTL in an email or during a team meeting if you're able to attend them, a greeting to the project team to ensure they know someone to talk to, making sure the TC is an accessible community.

TC Repos

While your main focus as a TC member is the governance repo, the complete list of repos that are under the governance of the TC is listed in governance/reference/technical-committee-repos.yaml.

The TC review dashboard can help you stay on top of what changes need your vote.

Duties

In general, being a member of the Technical Committee is as much work as you are willing to dedicate time to it. That said, there are some 'bare-minimums' you should be meeting.

Be Present on ML and IRC

As discussed above, communication is incredibly important. As a team, you want to make sure questions from the community in IRC and on the ML don't go unanswered.

Office Hours & Meetings

We hold office hours at various times during the week on the #openstack-tc IRC channel, see Eavesdrop for the schedule of those as well. For more information, see our wiki page. Attend as many office hours as you can. There might be a lot of them where no one outside the TC comes to talk about anything, but on the off chance that there is someone, or another TC member that has something to discuss, it is good to be present wherever possible. When office hours begin, wave or say hello or indicate in some way that you are around to chat. If something does get discussed during office hours, make sure that someone has the action item to summarize the discussion to the ML so that members not present, and the greater community have insight into what is being discussed.

Attend the Technical Committee meetings (assuming your timezone allows). The TC has meetings on the first Thursday of each month in #openstack-tc; check Eavesdrop for the current schedule. To hold the meeting we must meet quorum, so it's important that you attend as many as possible. If you have topics that should be discussed at the meeting, they should be sent to the chair or vice-chair to be included in the agenda. The agenda should also be publicized to the openstack-discuss list to encourage community involvement.

Governance Core Duties

Block time on your calendar at least weekly for reviewing open patches in the repos listed in technical-committee-repos.yaml. Even if you have already done a review of the patch, there might have been other progress that you should familiarize yourself with and stay up to date on. If you are interested, there are other repositories it might be good to keep an eye on as well that are related to TC duties like openstack/elections.

TC Interactions with Other Governing Bodies

Its encouraged that you attend Board of Directors meetings wherever possible. There are a variety of topics that often come up that the TC should be weighing in on. Sometimes there are face to face meetings as well where your attendance is encouraged.