Governing board

The Microsoft FinOps toolkit governing board defines and manages the overall mission, vision, and strategy and tracks performance and compliance with Microsoft Open Source policies and procedures. Governing board members are nominated and approved by the board based on their FinOps knowledge and broad participation within the community.

On this page:

• 💼 Responsibilities
• 🤔 Making decisions
• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Composition
• 📑 Meetings

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💼 Responsibilities

The board is responsible for identifying short-, medium-, and long-term goals and to organizing the project to best achieve them by:

• Mission: Defining and upholding toolkit goals and principles.
• Vision: Managing the direction and solutions included in the toolkit, including:
  • Defining objectives and key results (including quality and supportability).
  • Outlining a high-level roadmap with key focus areas and opportunities to expand.
• Strategy: Defining how we'll implement the vision, including:
  • Defining board roles and responsibilities.
  • Managing the GitHub community (e.g., triaging issues, answering discussions, reviewing PRs).
  • Establishing an official support process.
  • Managing and supporting contributors and engaging with new contributions.
  • Identifying and prioritizing initiatives.
• Performance: Driving and quantifying value for consumers and contributors, including:
  • External communications about releases (to drive adoption/engagement).
  • Internal communications about customer impact (to justify contributors' time).
  • Telemetry to measure satisfaction, engagement, adoption, retention, etc.
• Compliance: Ensuring we're in compliance with Microsoft policies and procedures.

Board members are also expected to facilitate Support escalations by:

• Reviewing new and unresolved issues and discussions at least once per week.
• Responding to Microsoft Support escalations within 2 business days.
• Responding to security investigations within 1 business day.

Board members are expected to loop in appropriate Advisory council members and key contributors as needed to facilitate resolving the issue in accordance with the support process. Board members are not expected to resolve issues directly unless they have deep technical knowledge about the solution.

🤔 Making decisions

The board follows a consensus decision-making process, which means:

1. Collaborative: Members work together to produce a shared proposal that meets the concerns of all group members as much as possible through constructive contributions.
2. Cooperative: Members strive to reach the best possible decision for the contributors, contributions, and consumers alike, rather than competing for personal preferences.
3. Egalitarian: All members have an equal opportunity to present and amend proposals.
4. Inclusive: As many board and council members as possible should be involved in the decision-making process.
5. Participatory: Members actively solicit the input and participation of all advisory council members and any additional, underrepresented stakeholders.

Decisions are generally made via "lazy approval", where consent is assumed unless valid objections are raised within 3-7 days. Decisions are approved when the board attains a supermajority (two-thirds) consensus and no objections. Any board or council member can request a 1-week extension of the deadline or to request an explicit vote across all board and council members.

Objections must have a clear justification, impact statement, and suggestions to make the proposal acceptable. If an objection is not actionable, it can be dismissed with a supermajority vote.

In general, board decisions should be open and transparent for any contributor or consumer upon request and documented in the repository. Any FinOps toolkit contributor or consumer can make an objection. The advisory council is responsible for ensuring concerns and objections from others are raised, but only council members' objections are binding.

If consensus cannot be reached within 14 days and the board believes the issue is deadlocked and unable to proceed, the board chair may decide the final resolution.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Composition

The governing board consists of the following representative seats:

Seat	Member
Business sponsor	Nelson Pereira
Community	Sonia Cuff
Consulting	Manfred Simonis
Engineering	Arthur Clares
Marketing	Vacant
Product	Michael Flanakin
FinOps Certified Professional	Vacant
Internal customer (one per FinOps persona)	Mark Aggar
External customer (one per FinOps persona)	Vacant
Advisory Council	Vacant

Individuals must meet the following criteria in order to attain a board seat:

1. Must contribute to multiple toolkit tools/resources or engage with the community an average of 2 distinct days per week, including customer calls.
2. Must have cursory knowledge of all toolkit tools and resources to support consulting and customer conversations.
3. Must dedicate and average of 4-8 hours per week on FinOps toolkit efforts.
4. Must participate in board meetings and discussions (synchronously or asynchronously).
5. Must attend at least one office hours per month.
6. Must be a FinOps Certified Practitioner.
7. Must attain a supermajority vote with no objections.

📑 Meetings

Governing board meetings are held on Tuesdays at 6am UTC. Meetings are recorded to support asynchronous collaboration for those not able to join. Advisory council members, contributors, and active community members may request to join these calls or view recordings. Recordings are only stored for 30 days.