This document is intended to give a member’s overview of how to engage in activities with and contribute to the RISC-V organizations.

New RISC-V members should start their reading in the Member Participation Guide wiki page.

The intended audience of this document is existing members who are ready to contribute.

If you have suggestions on how to improve this document, find information in the document that is incomplete or broken, or simply have an unanswered question, please either post a comment against this page.

New to RISC-V International? Start by completing the steps in the New Member Guide, Getting Started as a New Member section.

Once you are ready to contribute to RISC-V, continue with the following sections to set up access and explore resources needed for contribution.

Existing members who wish to contribute should compete these steps before starting to contribute:

1. Update your Groups.io profile as describe in the RISC-V Portal (Groups.IO) section below.

2. Request access to the RISC-V wiki and project management tools (Atlassian Confluence and Jira) in the Atlassian Tools section.

3. If you an acting or new chair or vice-chair for RISC-V group, review the “Getting Started as a Chair or Vice-chair of a RISC-V Group” section and complete the requested steps.

4. If you are a new TSC member, review the “Getting Started as a TSC Member” section and complete the requested steps.

There are multiple levels of contributions to the RISC-V community – participation and leadership. The following sections provide useful links for each area.

If you cannot find what you were looking for in them, try looking on the Exploring Resources for a New Member page.

As you participate in RISC-V activities, these links will be helpful.

• Technical Committees Details - listing of the information for all technical groups. Bookmark this page.

• Technical Calendar - a calendar of all RISC-V technical meetings.

• Specifications Under Development - the list of new specifications being developed grouped by status

• All Work Spaces - the main work meeting workspace for all active groups and technical committees.

• Mailing Lists - the list of all http://Groups.IO mailing lists.

• GitHub Organization - an explanation of the multiple GitHub organizations used by RISC-V.

• Latest ISA Spec Dev - the GitHub project where ISA development occurs.

• SAIL: Tutorial (source) - information about our golden model and simulator.

• Development Process - summary of RISC-V Group and Specification Lifecycles

• DevPartners - a RISC-V program for building RISC-V skills through contributions to key projects such as Sail, tests, compilers, toolchains, and other areas.

• DevBoards - a RISC-V program for software developers to get a board for enabling software.

• Ecosystem Labs - a RISC-V program to provide cloud images for enabling software.

Voting rights in a RISC-V groups is earned and must be continuously maintained.

To become a voting member, follow these steps:

1. Ensure that your LFX Profile is up to date as described in the Getting Started as a New Member section of the New Member Guide.

2. Locate the group mailing list in the RISC-V Mailing Lists.

   1. Navigate to the group page and select “Join the Group” in the bottom, left corner of the page.

      Open

      

   2. Review the group mailing list archives by selecting the “Messages” topic in the left navigation pane. Peruse this list for meeting announcements and other interesting technical topics.

3. Locate the group work space (wiki) by searching all workspaces.

   1. Once located, navigate to the “Meeting Minutes” section of the space to read about past meetings and view any future meeting draft agendas.

4. Find the next group meeting on the RISC-V Technical Calendar. Select the meeting and click “Register” and complete the form to receive an invitation to the meeting.
   Note: within a couple days of joining the group, any scheduled meetings should be sent to your email used in your LFX Profile information. In the case emails are missed or lost, you can re-add them to you calendar through your https://openprofile.dev/my-meetings .

5. Attend the first meeting and introduce yourself to the Chair and Vice-chair. During the meeting, request desire to be voting member. If necessary, follow-up with the chairs via email after the meeting. They should add you to the Participation and Voting page in the work space. Your voting rights should be granted immediately.

6. Maintain your voting rights by attending 2 of every 3 meetings and voting on required items.

More information can be found in the “Participation in HCs, ICs, TGs and SIGs” section of Policies and Procedures.

Those members who are leading a RISC-V Technical Committee or Group will need these resources:

• Getting Started as a Technical Contributor - steps that you need to take to contribute to RISC-V groups and specifications. Do this first if you are interested in becoming a group chair or authoring a specification.

• Technical Contributors Guide - guide for all participation topics. Start here with your participation questions.

• Development Process - simplified process overview. Bookmark this page.

• Tech Contribution Overview - location for all policies and process documentation and details

• Learn: LFX, Confluence & GitHub - short videos about key topics for chairs.

• Meeting Guidelines - one-pager for hosting meetings. Bookmark this page.

• Disclosures - video for use at the start of meetings.

• Email and Work Templates - locate standard email templates here

• Group Creation Planning Tool - web tool for estimating the schedule to create a new group

• Specification Ratification Planning Tool - a web tool for building specification schedules included in the Ratification Plan.

• Authoring and editing RISC-V specifications - details about writing specifications (“Docs Dev Guide”)

• Specifications Under Development - a status based view of all specifications underway

• SAIL: Add New Extension - example of how to add a new extension to the RISC-V Golden Model

• Find Member Organizations - tool for searching RISC-V member companies

• Tech Ops Meeting | TSC | ARC - leadership meetings (all invite only)

• Voting Status - status for every vote

• BoD Report - status of key specifications reported regularly to the Board

The tools need to contribute in RISC-V communities are:

1. Meeting Tools (Linux Foundation tools)

2. RISC-V Portal (Groups.IO)

3. Wiki (Confluence)

4. Project Management Tool (Jira)

5. Technical Calendar

6. Collaboration Tools (GitHub, Google Drive)

The Meeting Tools and RISC-V Portal tools are enabled in the Member Participation Guide. To contribute to RISC-V, additional updates are recommended to your RISC-V Portal Profile and access to the remaining tools need to be enabled. See the “Getting Started as Technical Contributor” section above for these steps.

More information about these tools is provided in the following subsections.

The RISC-V Portal (“mailing lists” or “communities”) in Groups.io: https://lists.riscv.org.  While these lists are publicly viewable, only RISC-V members can contribute.

Developers should validate they have completed all steps in “RISC-V Portal (Groups.IO)” section of the Member Participation Guide.

Then, they should updated their RISC-V Portal profile with their GitHub ID.  Follow these steps:

1. Click on this link: https://lists.riscv.org/g/main/editprofile 

2. Login if needed

3. Scroll to the bottom of the page

4. Add the appropriate information in the Github ID field.
   Note: there is not any data validation on these fields.  So, please use the Github (short) id in this field. See this video for a quick overview.

5. Submit using the blue "Update Group Profile" button.

For more information on which groups to join, please see the “Getting involved” section later in this document.

RISC-V uses Jira and Confluence to manage projects and organize groups. Access to these tools can be requested via TBD.

The RISC-V Wiki (sometimes called the “Technical Wiki”) is anchored at wiki.riscv.org. If you are looking for a piece of information in RISC-V, the Technical Wiki is great starting point.

The wiki tooling is Confluence. Access permission will be assigned when you request your Atlassian Tool access (see above). Your role in RISC-V will dictate the access you may be granted.

Questions or problems with wiki edit rights can be answered by following the directions in the “Requesting Help from the RISC-V Staff” section to submit a “General Request”.

RISC-V uses Jira to manage Groups, Specifications, and other common processes. RISC-V technical leaders (“chairs”) will need specific Jira access. Most members will simply consume information by navigating through the wiki.

The RISC-V Technical Calendar: https://tech.riscv.org/calendar/

Chairs and vice-chairs are encouraged will use the LFX Project Control Center (PCC) web tool (link) to schedule their group meetings. By doing so, group members in the community (Groups.IO) will automatically get invitations to the meeting. Meetings are marked “Public”, they will appear in the public calendar.

More details about how to use PCC for scheduling is described in the Project Control Center section below. To request authorization to schedule meetings in PCC, contact the RISC-V Staff.

Additional information on meetings, including timezone-centric links to the calendar,  can be found on the Calendars, Meetings, and Zoom wiki page.

PCC provides our frontend for Zoom meetings, and is available at http://pcc.lfx.dev. This tool leverages your account through the Linux Foundation Exchange (LFX).

Many of the common activities of PCC have been documented on the Technical Processes page. If you need assistance using PCC please send an email to help@riscv.org or file a ticket at https://help.riscv.org with as much detail as possible. Any privacy concerns regarding data privacy should be directed to info@riscv.org.

Hosting Duties: Meeting owners are expected to handle all meeting management duties including Scheduling a Meeting, Cancelling a Meeting (at least 24 hours prior to cancellation), and Updating a Meeting. Prior to joining a meeting, meeting owners should retrieve the Retrieving the Host Code directly from the PCC dashboard. Without this key, you cannot manage attendees or control recording status. After a meeting, it may be necessary to Get the Meeting Participants List to confirm voting privileges, Getting the Recording of a Meeting to distribute to invitees, Getting the Meeting Transcripts for meeting minutes, or Getting the AI Meeting Summary to get a meeting summary.

Explanation of Meeting Settings

The majority of the meeting settings should be familiar, and the uncommon settings will have a to denote further information beside them.

• Show in Public Calendar - Makes the meeting available in the public LFX calendar for everyone to see.

  • Recommendation: On for all Committee meetings, special invitation meetings may be set to Off.

• Restrict to invited users - Only invited users are allowed to attend the meeting.

  • Recommendation: Off for most meetings, only set to On if you must ensure that only invited users may attend the meeting.

• Let users join early - Allows users to join the meeting before the official start time.

  • Recommendation: Off for most meetings, unless there is a reason that they must start exactly on the hour, and are not running disclosures.

  • NOTE: This will start video recording, transcripts, and AI features when the first user logs in.

• Auto-upload recordings to YouTube - Uploads video to YouTube

  • Recommendation: Off as we generally do not have an expectation for meetings to be posted to YouTube.

  • NOTE: Only available if you have linked a YouTube account to your LFX account.

• Send reminder email to participants - Notifies participants ahead of the meeting to remind them of the meeting.

  • Recommendation: Off for technical committee meetings to reduce email clutter.

• Auto-record from meeting start - Will start recording the meeting automatically once the first participant joins the meeting.

  • Recommendation: On for meeting owner convenience, Off if “Let users join early” is set.

• Enable Zoom AI - Provides smart summaries for the meeting

  • Recommendation: On, but review output before publishing.

• Review AI summary before publishing - Holds the AI Summary in PCC before it is published to attendees.

  • Recommendation: On if using “Enable Zoom AI” to ensure that generated content can be reviewed.

• Where should users see the link(s) to AI summary - Controls whether individuals can get the AI summary through their individual dashboard, or if they need to get it through the PCC.

  • Recommendation: PCC Only

  • NOTE: We suggest meeting owners keep the AI summary for review, make manual updates, and publish the updated version in your meeting minutes.

Meeting Best Practices

• When cancelling a meeting, please give attendees at least 24 business hours notice. When cancelling a meeting, when possible cancel it at least the day before, and if cancelling a Monday meeting, please try and cancel it the Friday before.

• Get the Host Code from PCC, and enter it in the Zoom Participants section using the Host Code button.

• Give attendees 5 minutes to join the meeting, and at 5 minutes after the meeting start time, play the Disclosures video.

  • NOTE: When sharing your screen with Zoom, there is a checkbox option to “Share Audio”, by checking this you can make sure that attendees can properly hear the disclosures.

• When leaving the meeting, as host you may “End the meeting” (for all members) is the default or “Leave..” (which requires assigning a new host or co-host). Ensure when you leave the meeting, you select the correct option.

The RISC-V GitHub overview: GitHub Repo Map wiki page

RISC-V has multiple GitHub “organizations” under which their repositories are created.  These are described in greater detail and referenced via link on the wiki page.

All RISC-V specifications and software repositories are generally accessible.  However, contributions may be constrained to members only.  If you plan on contributing to a RISC-V GitHub repository or plan to be group Chair or Vice-Chair, the following steps should be taken:

1. If possible, enable your RISC-V portal (http://Groups.IO ) email as one of your public email addresses in your GitHub profile.

   To manage your GitHub emails,  sign-in and then navigate to: https://github.com/settings/emails .  On this page, you can use the “Add email address” field to add your RISC-V portal email address and verify that “Keep my email addresses private” is not checked.

2. Add  GitHub id in your RISC-V Portal account with the following steps:

   1. Click on this link: https://lists.riscv.org/g/main/editprofile 

   2. Login if needed

   3. Scroll to the bottom of the page

   4. Add the appropriate information in the Github ID field.
      Note: there is not any data validation on these fields.  So, please use the Github (short) id in this field. See this video for a quick overview.

   5. Submit using the blue "Update Group Profile" button.

While GitHub is preferred as a storage and organization tool, some activities such as spreadsheets and document collaboration are best performed with Google web-based tooling.  Therefore, RISC-V has opted to anchor all of their documentation in the for riscv members folder.  Generally speaking, read access to the documents should be available. 

When you request your RISC-V Portal access (step #1 in Set up Access section of the Member Participation Guide), the email address you use will be automatically added to a Google group within 3 working days to provide additional access to the RISC-V documents in Google Drive. 

If your email is not Google, you can enable it by following the directions found in the “Use an existing email address” section of the “Create a Google Account” article from Google.

To test that your membership has been set up correctly, the Member Authorization Test Document has been created for posting of comments by RISC-V members.  Directions for how to use the document and what to do if you cannot post comments are contained in the document.  Similar documents also exist for the following groups – Tech Chairs Authorization Test Document, Committee Chairs Authorization Test Document, TSC Authorization Test Document.

If for some reason your email address cannot be enabled or if you have any problems enabling it, please submit a “General Request” in the “Requesting Help from the RISC-V Staff” section asking for assistance with Google Drive access.

The Google Drive RISC-V entry point: for riscv members folder

1. for riscv members - the top-level folder into which all RISC-V members content is placed

2. Workgroups - contains folders which serve as the Google drive work space for working groups

3. Policies - holds all RISC-V policies organized into folder for their adoption state, e.g. approved or being written & pre-review

4. Status - organizes the various documents of for our specifications/work products

5. Information - collects many foundational documents key to the organization, including this one, the RISC-V Overview Presentation,  the RISC-V Technical Organization, and the Specification Lifecycle and Milestone Definitions 

The following sections are intended to help contributing members who have assumed leadership roles.

If you have assumed a leadership role for one of the RISC-V groups, let us begin by thanking you.  The RISC-V community is a “contributor culture” that only accomplishes work when members contribute.

The first thing chairs need to understand is that RISC-V has chairs and vice-chairs only.  There is no concept of co-chairs.  Secondly, group leaders should be aware of whether their “acting” or fully confirmed (approved).  Acting chairs are used at the beginning of a group’s existence and are working to get the group and the chairs functional and officially established (approved).  More information on this process can be found in the “Start a New Technical Committee” section of the RISC-V Development Process wiki page.

To prepare for your leadership position, please ensure to complete these steps:

1. Obtain access to all tools in the “Getting Started as a Technical Contributor” section above.

2. Follow the additional guidance in the “Getting involved” section.

3. Ensure you have the appropriate Video Conferencing application setup on your workspace and that you have the host information for your group. For new groups, see the “Requesting Help from the RISC-V Staff” section to obtain new credentials.  For existing groups, your predecessor or other chair may have this information and can share it.

4. Before your first meeting, familiarize yourself with the information on RISC-V Technical Meetings wiki page for a primer on meeting leadership.

5. Locate your group resources (see the note below as well):

   1. RISC-V Group in the Portal (http://Groups.IO ),

   2. Group meeting time in the https://tech.riscv.org/calendar/ calendar,

   3. group wiki space which can be searched in the wiki here.

6. If you are a confirmed chair (not “acting”), complete these few additional items:

   1. Ensure that you have a meeting invite to the appropriate meeting(s) listed above in the “Organizational Meetings” section.  You should at least have an invite to the Technical Chairs meeting.

   2. Work with the RISC-V Staff to ensure that you can vote using the tool described in the “Voting” section.  This typically involves the RISC-V Staff sending you a request to vote in a test election.  They will initiate this action when ready.

To prepare for your TSC position, please ensure to complete these steps:

1. Obtain access to “Getting Started as a Technical Contributor” in the section above.

2. Follow the additional guidance in the “Getting involved” section.

3. Locate the following for the TSC, CCM, and Technical Operations activities

   1. group resources: RISC-V Group in the Portal (http://Groups.IO ),

   2. Bookmark the TSC (link) and Technical Operations Meeting (link) wiki workspaces

   3. Group meeting time: https://tech.riscv.org/calendar/ calendar,

4. Work with the RISC-V Staff to ensure that you can vote using the tool described in the “Voting” section.  This typically involves the RISC-V Staff sending you a request to vote in a test election.  They will initiate this action when ready.

RISC-V uses Zoom for group meetings indirectly through the LFX Project Control Center (PCC) tool. These tools are accessed via your LFX id configured in the Linux Foundation (LFX) Tools section.

The Zoom meeting is provided as part of scheduling the meeting in PCC. Links are provided in the calendar entries.

Instructional, short videos on using LFX PCC can be found on the Videos wiki page.

When groups need to hold a formal vote, the OpaVote (https://www.opavote.com/ ) tool is used.  Voters receive an email with a link to their voting credentials.  Status of votes can be found on the Vote Status wiki page.

To learn more about the technical aspects of developing documentation in Asciidoctor, see the Authoring and Editing RISC-V Specifications document (or “Docs Dev Guide”).

The process of adding ISA extensions to the Sail RISC-V formal model is described in the Adding Extensions guide. A reading guide to the Sail model and a manual for the Sail language are also available.

To contribute to a specification or a technical area, find the most appropriate group in RISC-V Groups.IO Main page , join it, follow the discussions on the mailing list, attend the meetings, and volunteer to help.

To engage in the development of an active specification, visit the Specification Status wiki page, locate the Task Group or Committee which owns the specification, and join the group via the links provided.

If you are a member of the RISC-V Technical community, you should join the following groups:

• “All Members” (allmem) group to receive community-wide notifications.

•  “Tech Announce” (tech-announce) group to stay in touch with all things technical, including leadership “Call for Candidate” notices, specification reviews, and groups formation announcements. This is an announcement only list, not one for discussion. For discussions, use “Tech Exchange”.

• “Tech Exchange” (tech-exchange) group to engage in discussion about technical topics.

Specific groups of interest are the ISA and Horizontal Committees (ICs and HCs).  These groups are:

• “Unprivileged ISA Committee” (tech-unprivileged) group for discussions about user-mode extensions

• “Privileged ISA Committee” (tech-privileged) group for discussions about all privilege mode extensions

• “Applications & Tools Horizontal Committee” (apps-tools-software) group for discussions about tools, toolchains, compilers, and applications

• “Privileged Software Horizontal Committee” (privileged-software) group for discussions about platform enablement software such as firmware, kernels, hypervisors, etc.

• “Security Horizontal Committee” (security) group for discussions on all security topics

• “ISA Infrastructure Horizontal Committee” (isa-infra) group for discussions around non-extension discussions for the ISA such as Architectural Compatibility Testing (ACT), SAIL model development, documentation guidance, and Continuous Integration testing of the development tools.

• “SOC Infrastructure Horizontal Committee” (soc-infra) group for discussions about the components which straddle the hardware/software boundary such as RAS, Debug, Trace, and IOMMU.

• “Technology Horizontal Committee” (tech-sectors) group for market segment discussions like Datacenter, HPC, and Embedded

To find a list of all existing groups, see the RISC-V Portal page for “Sub-groups” at https://lists.riscv.org/g/main/subgroups .

To find the list of all existing and proposed groups, review the “Technical Org Chart” link on the main RISC-V wiki page (https://wiki.riscv.org/ ).

To propose a new group, see the “Starting a New Technical Committee“ section of the RISC-V Development Process wiki page.  If needed, see the “Requesting Help from the RISC-V Staff” section for guidance on how to get more assistance. 

To propose a new specification or topic, see the “Specification Development“ section of the RISC-V Development Process wiki page.  See the “Requesting Help from the RISC-V Staff” section for guidance on how to request more assistance.

To find an answer to a question, here’s how we suggest you find your answer:

1. Review a list of common process questions in the Policy Questions & Answers wiki page.

2. For questions about the ISA or compilers and software, post to the external mailing lists sw-dev and isa-dev.

3. Check out the working groups (see Information Organization above) to see if the topic is already discussed. Join and ask!

4. Join the RISC-V Slack workspace at https://join.slack.com/t/risc-v-international/signup and post to either the #random or #tech-general channels.

5. If all else fails, see the “Requesting Help from the RISC-V Staff” section for guidance on how to get more assistance.