OpenTitan Communications Policy

The following Communications Policy addresses OpenTitan-related communications by the OpenTitan Partners or their employees or affiliates, where those individual employees or affiliates may know, or reasonably have the appearance of knowing, non-public information about the OpenTitan Project. It also discusses the responsible use of G Suite accounts by OpenTitan Committers and Authorized Contributors, as well as the heightened responsibilities of OpenTitan Committee Members. Partners refers to the organizations or corporations that have signed the lowRISC Partner Agreement for the OpenTitan project. The OpenTitan Communications Policy will extend to additional official project partners as they are onboarded and sign the lowRISC Partner Agreement.

Open Source Collaboration

To the extent possible any OpenTitan technical collaborations should be conducted publicly and transparently. To that end, OpenTitan’s open source repositories will be public on GitHub. The OpenTitan Project will, subject to the discretion of the official Committers (as defined in the OpenTitan Technical Committee Terms of Reference), accept pull requests from members of the public. All discussions in the OpenTitan GitHub repositories are subject to the OpenTitan code of conduct.

Committers, Authorized Contributors, and Semi-Open Collaboration

The OpenTitan Project will maintain documents and discussion lists for the purposes of facilitating collaboration. These resources will include an OpenTitan Team Google Drive folder that will not be publicly accessible, but which will be made semi-open through the assignment of “@opentitan.org” G Suite accounts to external contributors. This assignment of G Suite accounts and resource access will be made for approved Committers. Committers are individuals with repository write access. While everyone can and is encouraged to contribute by reviewing code, committers are responsible for final approval and merge. Additionally, G Suite accounts may be assigned to any contributors to the OpenTitan Project who are proposed by the OpenTitan Technical Committee and approved by the OpenTitan Governing Board (“Authorized Contributors”). Committers and Authorized Contributors’ access to @opentitan.org G Suite accounts and related access must be in compliance with:

This Communications Policy
The OpenTitan Acceptable Trademark Use Policy
and the OpenTitan Code of Conduct.

For the avoidance of doubt, Committers and Authorized Contributors’ may use their @opentitan.org G Suite accounts to set up profiles and contribute comments in public discussion on sites such as Reddit, Hacker News, etc., if and only if those @opentitan.org G Suite linked accounts are only used to confirm publicly available information, such as pointing to official OpenTitan Project documentation or official OpenTitan blog posts.

Prior to using @opentitan.org G Suite accounts to publicly share any information or comment beyond what is already publicly available, Committers and Authorized Contributors must contact press@lowrisc.org for permission.

Similarly, if a Committer or Authorized Contributor accidentally used an @opentitan.org G Suite account for unapproved communications, notify press@lowrisc.org as soon as possible. Any unauthorized attempt to use an @opentitan.org email address or G Suite account to impersonate a lowRISC employee, member of the Governing Board or official spokesperson (i.e., making statements as if one is answering authoritatively, officially, or with permission) on behalf of the OpenTitan Project will be considered a violation of this Communications Policy and the violating Authorized Contributor will lose authorization and G Suite access. Similarly, any unauthorized or bad faith attempts to misuse this access to represent OpenTitan or imply official affiliation or authorization where none exists will be considered a violation of this Communications Policy and potentially the Acceptable Trademark Use Policy as well. If a Committer or Authorized Contributor violates this Communications Policy, the violating individual will lose authorization and G Suite access at the discretion of the OpenTitan Governing Board.

Communications by OpenTitan Partners

The organizations or corporations that have signed the lowRISC Partner Agreement for the OpenTitan project (“Partners”) may publicly confirm the following:

That they are official Partners on the OpenTitan Project;
Acknowledgement of all other official Partners of the OpenTitan Project;
That they are contributing financial resources and/or engineering resources to the OpenTitan Project (as applicable);
Factual information based on the latest OpenTitan FAQ document maintained by press@lowrisc.org ;
Publicly shared email aliases for relevant OpenTitan points of contact, e.g. , press@lowrisc.org for press inquiries, and get-involved@opentitan.org and getinvolved@lowrisc.org for anyone interested in contributing.

These statements may be made in social media (e.g., Tweets, Facebook posts, etc.) as well as in blog posts or interviews with the press and/or industry analysts. All Partner blog posts should be shared in draft form with press@lowrisc.org prior to publication in order to ensure accuracy and consistency. Similarly the employees and/or contractors of Partners may confirm on social media that they are working on the OpenTitan project if that is factually correct.

Publication

OpenTitan Partners and individuals affiliated with the OpenTitan Partners may wish to publish material related to OpenTitan. This may include (but is not limited to) blog articles, videos, papers and presentations, referred to this document as “articles”. If individuals affiliated with the OpenTitan Partners wish to publish about OpenTitan, the articles should be shared in draft form with press@lowrisc.org prior to publication and permission secured before posting. If individuals wish to present articles about OpenTitan but have no direct relationship with the OpenTitan Project, such as working at a Partner organization as a full time or temporary employee but with no insider knowledge of the OpenTitan Project ( e.g. , in no way contributing to OpenTitan or knowledgeable about internal conversations regarding OpenTitan contributions), they may write articles in a personal capacity so long as it is prominently disclaimed at the start of the article that it is a personal article, shared without authorization and not representing the opinions of the OpenTitan Project or its Partners. It is up to individuals to also adhere to their own employers’ policies regarding public publication activities ( e.g. , following company code of conduct guidelines, etc.). All open source communications will be subject to the same guidelines for other open source contributors, as noted above. For any non-open source communications, Partners and their affiliates, employees, and/or contractors should keep in mind their confidentiality agreements with lowRISC CIC and/or Google LLC with respect to any non-public intellectual property or trade secrets.

Communications by OpenTitan Committee Members

As noted in the OpenTitan Project Charter, members of the OpenTitan Governing Board (“GB”) and members of the OpenTitan Technical Committee (“TC”) each have a good faith duty to act in the best interests of the Project. Any GB member or TC member communications regarding the OpenTitan project must keep this good faith duty in mind. Any bad faith communications resulting from a conflict of interest or other bad faith interest in discouraging the success of the OpenTitan collaboration are inconsistent with the responsibilities of the GB and TC member roles. Otherwise, complete honesty and openness are encouraged whenever feasible.

Further questions?

The most up-to-date information, as well as its public or non-public communication status, will be maintained by press@lowrisc.org. Please contact press@lowrisc.org with any questions. If you are interested in joining the OpenTitan Project, all intake is channeled through get-involved@opentitan.org