About

• Version: 1.7

• Creation date: 2020-05-11

• One line description: Guidance on practices if you are a chair or vice chair

• Author(s): Charlie Su, Mark I Himelstein

Background

Chairs may or may not have had experience running a group in an Open Source community or with broad company and geographical diversity. This document provides best practices.

Details

• Review key organizational documents which are the basis for all groups

  • Code of Conduct - defines how we will treat each other

  • RISC-V Policies and Procedures - defines the policies for establishing groups and developing specifications

  • Getting Started Guide - provides important information for setting up tools for technical contributions by members

  • RISC-V Technical Meetings - provides a single page for hosting a RISC-V Meeting

  • Encumbered Information - details how we handle intellectual property from non-members

  • Disclaimer slides - holds the common reminder information used to start all RISC-V meetings

  • RISC-V Jira Specification Dashboard - shows all specifications under development

  • RISC-V Jira Group Dashboard - show all active groups and their information

  •  

• Getting started

  • Familiarize yourself with the RISC-V technical organizational structure, the various group types and areas of work.

  • Work with the Technical Project Managers (TPMs) (help@riscv.org) to have your community mailing list created (http://Groups.IO ) and community documents repository (GitHub) setup

    • Ensure you are a moderator in the group, contact help@riscv.org if you are not.

    • Provide your GitHub id to TPMs and accept the invitation to be an Admin to the repository

  • Lead a discussion on the community mailing list (setup above) about when to hold the first meeting and schedule it. Ask help@riscv.org with running a survey if needed.

  • Lead first meeting with an agenda like the following:

    • Self-introduction of all attendees - name, company, experience, interest in group

    • Discussion about meeting frequency and timing

    • Charter review, discussion, and updates.  Typically, the group sponsor (Technical Steering Committee [TSC], Horizontal Committee [HC], ISA Committee [IC], or Horizontal Sub-Committee [HSC]) provides a draft charter statement.  The goal is to have a written Charter.md file in your GitHub repo home directory that will be approved by your sponsors.

      • A good Task Group (TG) charter describes how it achieves filling in a gap defined by the Special Interest Group (SIG) or Committee that spawned it (directly or dotted line). It lists the specific small set of  deliverables it will deliver.

      • A SIG is an extension of a Committee, in that its only deliverables are strategy, gaps, and prioritizations, and helping spawn other SIGs or TGs to fill the gaps. A good SIG charter spells out the small set of topic areas their strategy will address along with its responsibilities as laid out in this bullet.

  • Lead the next few working meetings focused on reviewing and refining the charter and gaps in your strategic area.

    • Be sure to review the Charter drafts with the RISC-V Staff and your sponsoring Chair and Vice-chair to get their feedback.

    • If you are a SIG, document your gap analysis in another document and retain it in your group wiki workspace so that you can re-visit and update as needed in the future.  Ensure that your charter provides a vision for how gaps may be addressed.

    • When your charter is defined and stable, your sponsoring Chair and Vice-chair will help seek approval.

  • Acting chair and/or vice chair should work with the RISC-V Staff and group to elect permanent leadership through a Call for Candidates.
    Note: Acting chairs may become the elected chairs.

  • Once the formal (non-acting) Chair and Vice-chair are elected, and the Charter is approved, the group should work towards completing the plan milestone. 

• Regular group meetings

  • Do as much in email without meetings as you can

    • Take items offline as appropriate

    • Conduct discussions on the group’s email list. Spec issues go in github issues. Cross group things go in Jira.

  • Groups or Committees that are active and producing work product (specs, etc.) should hold meetings periodically (at least once every 1-3 months) as appropriate.

  • Schedule and host virtual meetings

  • Use the United States Pacific Time as the time zone for scheduling all meetings.  By everyone uses this as the base time zone for their meetings, relative meeting times among different meetings won’t inadvertently drift either.

  • Display the common disclaimer slides at all meetings. If you want them included in your agenda slides please use links (option when you paste in google slides) so you always have the latest.

  • Be respectful of different time-zones and cultures and companies and countries when scheduling or running meetings.

  • Repeat questions when answers are given

  • Notify attendees that only members are allowed in meetings. Ask that non-members please exit the meeting.  It is not your job to enforce the rules. If there is someone you don’t believe belongs there send email to help@riscv.org. 

  • Ask everyone to have identifiable names (first and last name and company/individual) when logging into zoom

  • Use RISC-V tools (zoom, github, calendar)

  • Send meeting agendas at least two days in advance. Ask for items members would like to add to the agenda

  • Pass down messages from chairs or TSC meetings

  • Record, send, and archive meeting minutes

  • keep up-to-date with chair meeting agendas and notes

  • If anyone is saying something inappropriate, 

    • State that the behavior is inconsistent with the RISC-V Code of Conduct and ask them to stop. If the behavior has occurred via email, use reply-all for your request.

    • To continue activity and model the proper behavior, redirect the conversation back to the issue at hand.

    • If the inappropriate behavior re-occurs in a meeting, adjourn it. 

    • Report the incident to either help@riscv.org or to the code of conduct email, conduct@riscv.org.

• Ongoing tasks

  • Manage extension/feature lifecycle. This should be the highest priority

    • include work relating to drafts, change rationale, change control, definition of done, etc.

    • optimize the delivery of useful specs.

  • Attend regular Tech Ops Meetings (& TSC meetings if appropriate)

  • Attend the sponsoring committee meetings and work with the Chairs and Vice-chairs to deliver on their responsibilities and charter as well as updating them on your group’s progress

  • Raise blockers to Chairs Meeting promptly

  • Work with sponsoring Chair and Vice-chair to address technical blockers

  • Address questions posed to the group with at least some SLA

    • E.g. “the answer will be next week” or “we decided not to address this now” 

  • Interact with other teams based on org chart

• Evangelism

  • Grow partners and/or members for the group. If you identify people or entities that should be involved but are not and you don’t how to reach out to them, send email to help@riscv.org

  • If leading a SIG, perform SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats) analysis and build a plan to address gaps.

  • Promote the groups’ technologies in conferences and seminars

• Recognize that there are two logical roles for each group: logistical/administrative lead, and technical lead. Try to play to people’s strengths and interests. If you are missing someone to play one of these roles and don’t know how to fill it, please send email to help@riscv.org

• Leave marketing and PR to the marketing team. If you have something you need them to pay attention to, please send an email to help@riscv.org. 

• Groups should publish the links to charter, specs and various documents according to the best practices and GitHub Repo Structure & Adminstration document and go into the appropriate repo (technical group vs spec vs upstream, etc.).

• Groups should use GitHub issues and Jira as described in the Getting Started Guide.

• Remember that we as engineers often side on being critical thinkers and listeners. Please remember to thank and acknowledge the effort of members even if their effort needs more work.

If you have any questions please ask help@riscv.org.

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