Technical Committee Onboarding Guide

You’re either here because you are interested in being on the TC one day or because you were 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), you can nominate yourself as per the TC Chair Election process.

After the chair is designated, vice-chair will be appointed as per the chair responsibility defined in CHAIR.rst in the governance repository.

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.

  1. Email: 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.

  2. IRC channel: 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.

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 https://opendev.org/openstack/governance/raw/branch/master/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.

Meetings

Attend the Technical Committee meetings (assuming your timezone allows). The TC has meetings every Thursday in #openstack-tc; check Eavesdrop. 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

Book time on your calendar for reviewing open patches in the TC Repos. As a TC member, you are a primary maintainer (a core member in OpenStack terms) of all the TC repos. 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.