Open Stack

Hello, team,

I am excited to welcome all of you to the start of this 6-month
session of the OpenStack Technical Committee, running May through
November. I thought it would be a good idea to review a few policies
and resources as we start the session.

* Governance documentation

We manage our official documentation for the TC using the
openstack/governance repository and publish the content to
https://governance.openstack.org/tc. Please familiarize yourself
with the content, if you haven't already.

In particular, please read the TC charter
(https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html), which
describes the committee's operating and voting rules.

* Reviews and Votes

You should all have your Gerrit rights set up. Please let me know
if you do not have permission to cast RollCall votes on changes in
openstack/governance.

You may find this dashboard link useful for organizing your reviews:
http://bit.ly/os-tc-dashboard

Proposals that require a formal vote of the entire committee are
marked with the "formal-vote" topic so that you can more easily
find them all on Gerrit regardless of whether you use the dashboard.

* Approving Governance Changes

I intend to start out following Thierry's process for approving
changes, so I will quote his description from the message kicking
off the last session:

  The default approval rules are described in the charter. To be
  approved, a vote needs to have (when the vote "closes") more +1s
  than -1s, and at least 5 +1s. In practice (in order to avoid
  having to signal vote closing) changes are approved when they hit
  majority (7 +1s) after a 3-day grace period to allow for last-minute
  objections that may swing votes. For some rare cases of tight
  votes, a "final call for votes" will be emitted when discussion
  is exhausted, and the default rule will approve.

Some of the changes we see do not require a formal vote, and we
want to process those as quickly and efficiently as possible. Our
house rules
(https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/house-rules.html)
describe exceptions to the formal voting rule for several common
types of changes.

* TC Tracker and status updates

During the previous session we started tracking the initiatives we
have in progress or on our backlog using storyboard. Please keep
an eye on the governance project there
(https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/923).

I will continue to use the TC Tracker wiki page
(https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Technical_Committee_Tracker) to
report the status of the formal-vote items. You may want to "watch"
that page to receive updates.

I will also continue to send the weekly update emails Thierry started
when we dropped our regular meetings. I'm going to assume you all
read those emails, and use them for other sorts of reminders and
notices in addition to it being a status report for the TC.

* IRC channel and office hours

We switched from one weekly IRC meeting to several "office hours"
scheduled throughout the week in time slots with a goal of making
it easier for geographically (and temporally) diverse community
members to participate. One of our first discussions should be about
how well that is working, and whether the time slots selected need
to be adjusted.

The current schedule is:

  * 09:00 UTC on Tuesdays
  * 01:00 UTC on Wednesdays
  * 15:00 UTC on Thursdays

Please join #openstack-tc on freenode, especially during the office
hours slots that are convenient for you. You may also want to set
up a notification for the string "tc-members".

* TC Mailing-list

We use the openstack-tc mailing list (this one) for administrative
communications to all TC members, such as this message. Please make
sure you are subscribed.

The list is public and archived, but posts by people who are not
on the TC are moderated. The TC list is not meant for technical or
governance change discussion; those threads should be sent to the
openstack-dev ML, using the [tc] prefix.

* Leadership Meeting in Vancouver

There will be a Board+TC+UC+Staff meeting in Vancouver on Sunday,
May 20, from 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM. See
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/20May2018BoardMeeting
for details. Participation is voluntary but encouraged.

Thank you all for volunteering to serve on the TC this session!

Doug