ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee Community Representative Election

Overview

According to a resolution passed by the ROS 2 TSC, we intended to add three elected community representatives as members of the ROS 2 TSC in 2021. These community representatives will be granted the full rights and privileges of a traditional ROS 2 TSC representative, including voting rights on all ROS 2 TSC resolutions.

Election Process

The number of community representatives on the TSC is predicated on the number of non-community TSC members, with a lower bound of no less than 3 or 10% of the traditional TSC members, whichever is greater. With 20 members currently in the TSC, this means that the 2021 election will be for three community representatives. Furthermore, according to the charter amendment on the matter, in the first year of the community representative process, one of the representatives will serve a one off, single year, term. For clarity we will call this representative the “short term” community representative.

The election process is described in detail in the ROS 2 charter. To summarize the process, any ROS community member can nominate themselves to be a community representative. These self nominations mu st be submitted via this Google form. Nominees should include a short (< 500 word) description of themselves in markdown format along with the relevant contact information by no later than October 1st, 2021. The description can and should include links to relevant ROS projects, writings, research, and community discussions. Once the nomination process has closed Open Robotics will create a single election information landing page and cross post it to ROS Discourse for community discussion. At the start of ROSWorld, meaning the start of the workshop day, a second thread will be created on ROS Discourse that includes both the relevant information along with a link to the electronic ballot (CIVS) that will be open until noon on the last day of ROSWorld. At the end of the first full day of ROSWorld each community representative will be given a two minute lighting talk slot (recorded) to campaign. These campaign videos may be broadcast during the program or we may share a link to them (we’re presently working out the schedule and details).The final results will be tallied using the Condorcet method and announced at the end of ROSWorld. The short term community representative will be selected as the third most popular candidate. Newly elected community representatives will start their term in January of 2022.

Key Dates and Links

Event Date Relevant Link
Nominations Open 9/23/2021
Nominations Closed 10/1/2021
Nominations Posted 10/4/2021
Candidates Submit Lightning Talks 10/14/2021
Voting Opens 10/19/2021 (9am CST)
Candidate Lighting Talks 10/20/2021
Election Closes / Results Announced 10/21/2021
Community Representatives Take Office 1/1/2022

Additional Considerations

The TSC Community rep process is new this year and it was initially created with the belief that we would have an in-person ROSCon in 2021. Unfortunately we had to pivot to a remote event again, and as such we’re going to adapt the election to ROSWorld. We really hope we can have the same level of community involvement as the in person event. The official dates have been modified from the TSC charter to reflect the change in schedule and event.

We really want to encourage a diverse pool of candidates for the election and as such we’re encouraging anyone who is interested to apply, this includes academics, freelancers, and students. If you would like to run but are worried about your experience, don’t worry, e-mail Kat (kat@openrobotics.org) and we can help to find you a suitable mentor.

11 Likes

I’m super excited to see the TSC including community members. One question that I have is: how do you see these representatives having a meaningful impact on ROS2? Maybe I don’t fully understand how the TSC works, but from what I can tell most of the members of the TSC seem to define their own development goals, rather than the TSC really deciding what essential features to develop for each ROS2 release.

-Fergs

1 Like

TSC sounds like a good and needed thing. Even among my local friends we are divided by hardware choices and varying goals for our robots. It is good if a “Most Common Ground” can be found or logically decided on. It is great when we work together, and other times feels like herding cats. I am a Python 3 AI developer, so the Jetson Nano is my go to computer, but ROS2 Eloquent on Jetson Ubuntu 18 is only suitable for simple demos. Xubuntu 20.04 with ROS2 Foxy is substantially better, but the number of devs using that distro is very limited. I hope a SBC with GPU processors emerges for ROS2 soon.

The idea is that we want to have other perspectives from the community rather than the usual composition of the TSC. There are groups like small startups who’s founders / members are deeply integrated into the ROS community or research institutes that cannot meet the FTE requirements of the TSC that have valauble insight or experience that we should have represented.

So the impact would be in attending the meetings and being active within those meetings to give their thoughts as a community member and actions that would be in the best interests of the broader ROS community and the sub-group they belong to (e.g. small startup, PhD student, researcher, high-profile project maintainer, etc).

We often discuss topics like roadmaps, default DDS implementations, project updates, etc. All of these are areas that a different perspective could have value in.

4 Likes

Can I nominate somebody else?

What do you ask from the representatives? For example, how often are the meetings? And what time are the meetings?

1 Like

No, but you can encourage them to run.

Meeting are monthly and vary to accommodate global time zones. I would estimate the monthly commitment from each representative would be a minimum of eight hours with no upper bound.

I would love to see reps that are package maintainers and would be willing to put in time for more concerted community efforts.

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