TSC Election Process (#1301)

* Initial Draft

* Remove production deployment example

* Remove the production deployment example to avoid confusion, the original text is self explanatory

* Add one SII entry for end customer profilieration.

* Add section for yearly weight

* Adjusted SII weight based on feedback

* Update SII for HLDs and PRs

* HLD and PR SII calculation to include both LFX SONiC and OCP SAI as discussed and agreed earlier

* Add min score, voting info

---------

Co-authored-by: Lihua Yuan <lihuay@live.com>
Co-authored-by: Adam Yeung <47261130+adyeung@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Lihua Yuan <lihuay@users.noreply.github.com>

tsc/TSC_Election.md

@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
+# Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Election
+
+   The SONiC Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is responsible for directing the technical aspects of the SONiC project by bringing together members from various segments of the SONiC community to advance its development. Serving as a TSC member entails a substantial time commitment, technical expertise, and a grasp of industry trends. Instead of overloading the TSC with a heavy process of candidate screening, voter’s eligibility assessment, voting weight assignment, vote counting, the TSC should be focused on better serving the community by driving the technical roadmap of SONiC.  
+
+## Meritocracy Principle
+
+   We embrace the principle of meritocracy and strive to ensure that the TSC is composed of organizations and individuals who are qualified and committed to the project.  To this angle, we would like to ensure the election process is through transparent and quantifiable attributes in the SONiC Community Ecosystem, the elected organizations are heavily invested and involved in the success of SONiC.  We invite individuals and organizations to participate in the TSC election process, and we will weigh their opinions according to their contributions to the SONiC project as a whole.  In the following, we describe how we quantify the contributions of each individual or organization based on the concept of "SONiC Influence Index (SII)".
+
+$$
+SONiC Influential Index (SII) = (Contribution \times Weight) + (Innovation \times Weight) + (SONiC Proliferation \times Weight )
+$$
+
+| Contribution (Yearly) | Category | Weight Multiplier |
+|--------------------------------  |----------| -------- |
+| Merged HLD [1] Count              | Development | 50 |
+| Merged PR [2] Count (S/M/L)       | Development | 10/20/50 |
+| PR Review Count (S/M/L)       | Development | 1/2/5    |
+| PR cherry-picking [3] Count       | Development |  5 |
+| Documentations (Release Notes/Meeting Minutes) | Development |  50/1  |
+| New ASIC [4] Introduction Count | Development |  100 |
+| Issues Opened Count               |  Quality [5] | 5 |
+| Issues Triaged/Fixed Count        | Quality | 10 |
+| Merged SONiC MGMT TEST Plan HLD [1] Count | Quality | 100 |
+| Merged Test cases [2] (S/M/L)        | Quality | 20/40/100|
+| TEST PR review count (S/M/L)     | Quality | 2/4/10 |
+| Summit Presentation Count       | Innovation | 50  |
+| Hackathon Participation Team Count | Innovation | 10 |
+| SONiC Production Deployment (S/M/L) [6] | Proliferation | 100/500/1000 |
+| SONiC End Consumer Proliferation (S/M/L) | Proliferation [7] | 5/50/100 |
+
+HLDs and PRs SII calculation includes both LFX SONiC and OCP SAI Projects
+
+[1]: HLD are new or substantial changes reviewed in the community review meeting, minor amendment are counted towards merged PR
+
+[2]: PR sizing Small/Medium/Large based on LoCs, each carries a different multiplier (Small: 1-50 LoCs, Medium: 51-300 LoCs, Large: >301 LoCs)
+
+[3]: PR cherry-picking is release maintenance branch to ensure high quality of a release community branch.
+
+[4]: ASIC support is a prerequisite of platform enablement and rollout of SONiC. ASIC support is from SAI binary distribution not accounted for in the merged PR contribution. Platform enablement/introduction will be accounted in merged PRs.
+
+[5]: SONiC community view quality as the foundation to deliver a stable and reliable product. Therefore, we consciously attribute more weight to quality contribution.
+
+[6]: SONiC Production Deployment Small/Medium/Large based on production network instances deployed within the organization (Small: 100 - 500, Medium: 501 - 50,000, Large: >50,001).
+
+[7]: SONiC end consumer proliferation Small/Medium/Large based on open source or commercial distribution of SONiC. This is for contribution in enabling consumers/broader market across trainings, deployment support, engineering assistance, and anything related to helping them move in production with SONiC. Weightage is assigned based on production network deployment size (Small: 100 - 500, Medium: 501 - 50,000, Large: >50,001). Production Deployment score is counted per election cycle, eg, an organization which supported 1000 SONiC production node rollout will add 50 points to its SII, an organization which supported 11,000 SONiC production node rollout will add 100 points to its SII
+
+There will be more forms of involvement and attributes to be accounted for as the SONiC project evolves, future changes to SII structure will require TSC approval.
+
+The above SII can be computed for each community member at individual level or organizational level on a yearly basis.  To balance the need of motivating more recent contribution and the need of maintain relative stability of the TSC, we will use the following weight for the last 5 years to calculate the overall SII for each community member.
+
+| Last n Year | Weight |
+|-----------|--------|
+| 1 | 0.30 |
+| 2 | 0.25 |
+| 3 | 0.20 |
+| 4 | 0.15 |
+| 5 | 0.10 |
+
+## Voter Participation
+
+   The TSC election process will be open to all SONiC community contributing members to participate as a voter. They can either participate as an unaffiliated individual or or at the organizational level as a single entity.  Every organization or individual participating the TSC election will calculate their SONiC Influential Index (SII) based on above mentioned formula, and their vote will be weighted according to their SII.  To avoid double counting, a community member can only participate in the election process as either an unaffiliated individual or an organization, but not both.
+
+## Nominee Identification
+
+1. **Organizational Nominee**:
+   We recognize that fact that at this point most SONiC community members are contributing to the project as part of the overall effort of their respective organizations.  Therefore, those organizations can choose to participate in the TSC election process as a single entity.  However, we ask each organization to nominate ONE representative to serve on the TSC with sufficient time commitments.
+
+   While individual community members may change their organizations or roles, the organizations themselves are more stable in their commitment to SONiC.  Therefore, the elected organizations will retain the right to nominate another community member as their organizational representative in the TSC later without an re-election being necessary.
+
+2. **Individual Nominee**:
+   We also recognize that there are individual community members who have contributed significantly to the project and are not affiliated with any organization. We welcome these individuals to nominate themselves for the TSC. We do not accept third-party nominations for individual community members to ensure the commitment from the nominee.
+
+## Election Process
+
+Each voting organization or individual will cast their vote to select 9 TSC members. Their vote will carry the weight according to the SII calculated.  The election process will be conducted in the following steps:
+
+1. Nominee inform the community of their intention to run for the TSC by sending a nomination letter to the TSC chair and community manager. The nomination letter should include the following information:
+   * Name
+   * Organization
+   * Email
+   * SII (with information on how this is calculated)
+   * A brief statement of why the nominee wants to serve on the TSC
+
+   A nominee will need to meet a minimum SII score of 100 to be eligible.
+
+2. Voters inform the community of their intention to vote by sending a vote letter to the TSC chair and community manager. The vote letter should include the following information:
+   * Name
+   * Organization
+   * Email
+   * SII (with information on how this is calculated)
+   * A list of 9 nominees to vote for
+
+   If any individual in an organization decide to cast vote as an individual, then the organization has to exclude the SII contribution from this individual from the overall SII of the organization.
+
+The actual voting process will be conducted by Linux Foundation using OpaVote system (or another system approved by the TSC).  The election process will be conducted in a transparent manner and the results will be published on the SONiC community website.
+
+The top 9 candidates with the highest total SII will be elected as TSC members.
+
+The current TSC chair is Lihua Yuan [lihua@linux.com]) and community manager is Lucy Hyde [lhyde@linuxfoundation.org]). They will be responsible for organizing the election process in a transparent manner.