Use the board

The board lists work that has been proposed but has not become a flight yet. Each entry is a nomination: a proposal that some work should become a flight, together with the kind of work it needs and why. Use this guide to see what has been proposed, to decide which proposals become flights, and to find out why a proposal never became one.

A gate is a flight that has stopped and is waiting on a person. A nomination is one step earlier: work that has not started.

Where nominations come from

Nominations arrive from several places:

• Watches. A watch looks at something on a schedule, such as a work-item query, and nominates work from what it finds. Set up a watch covers them.
• Plans. A planning flight, or a plan a person proposes, nominates each of its legs. Legs are listed with their plan by gg itineraries rather than on the board. Plan with itineraries covers plans.
• Pull requests. A pull request opened or updated in a registered repository can nominate a flight, such as a review.
• Flights opened directly. A flight opened with gg fly also passes through the board, as a nomination that opens at once. It never waits there.

Auto or gated

Every nominator is bounded by a flight destination, and its opens-as setting decides how a nomination opens:

• auto (the default): the nomination opens as a flight straight away, if the rules allow it. Nobody needs to answer it.
• gated: the nomination waits on the board until a person opens or declines it.

An auto nomination can still wait. When a nominator has spent its budget, such as five flights in a day, its nominations become gated, and the board says why.

# An example destination for a planning work kind.
destinations:
  the-plan:
    kind: flight
    requires:
      - plan-reviewed
    opens:
      - implement
      - review
    opens-as: gated
    cap-per-pass: 5

Changing auto to gated tightens the rules. Changing gated to auto loosens them, so it waits for approval.

1. Read the board

Run gg board:

gg board

1 nomination(s) standing. Ended ones are not shown - gg board --all.

01a0792a-5c4e-4b1f-9d3e-2f6a8c1b7e44 - review
  nominated by: watch:triage
  about:        https://dev.azure.com/example-org/example-project/_workitems/edit/1234
  standing:     gated - it is waiting for somebody
  nominated:    2026-10-14 15:02:41Z

Each nomination shows:

Line	Meaning
The first line	The nomination’s id, then the work kind it would open. A nomination has no flight number, because it is not a flight yet.
nominated by	What proposed it, such as a watch or a plan.
for	The person it belongs to, when it came from a person’s own watch. Only that person may answer it.
about	The piece of work, such as a work item’s address. Free-text work says so.
standing	gated when it is waiting for someone, or auto when nobody needs to answer it.
because	Why a gated nomination is gated, when the gate came from a spent budget.
nominated	When it was proposed.

gg board --all includes nominations that have ended, each with an ended line, a because line and, when it opened, the flight it became. A nomination ends in one of six ways:

Ending	Who ended it
opened	It became a flight.
declined	A person said no.
refused	The rules said no, and the reason names the rule.
superseded	A newer version of the same work arrived.
lapsed	Nobody opened it in time.
dropped	The plan that named it no longer does.

Only opened and declined are a person’s decision; the others belong to the board, the clock and the rules.

2. Open or decline a nomination

Use the full id that gg board prints, and a reason. The reason is required either way, because it is the only record of why a person opened work nobody asked for, or declined work somebody did:

gg board open 01a0792a-5c4e-4b1f-9d3e-2f6a8c1b7e44 "This item blocks the release."
gg board decline 01a0792a-5c4e-4b1f-9d3e-2f6a8c1b7e44 "Already fixed in the current sprint."

Opening a nomination asks the board to open it. The board still applies the rules, and may refuse. gg therefore reports what the board recorded, not what was asked for:

01a0792a-5c4e-4b1f-9d3e-2f6a8c1b7e44 - review
  about:        https://dev.azure.com/example-org/example-project/_workitems/edit/1234
  ended:        opened
  because:      This item blocks the release.
  flight:       GG-61

  looked:   2 time(s) over 0.6s of a 30s bound

If the board has not settled when gg stops watching, gg says the decision was recorded and the outcome is not known yet. Run gg board --all to see it. An opened nomination can briefly show opened, and its number is not minted yet before its flight number appears.

The flight a nomination opens belongs to whoever the work is for, not to the person who opened it.

The same steps in the console

Run gg with no arguments, then:

• ; opens the board. * shows everybody’s rows, v switches between nominations and the sweeps of watches, and enter opens the selected row.
• In an open row, o opens the nomination, d declines it, and f goes to the flight it became.
• Nominations waiting on a person also appear in the queue (,). There, enter opens or declines one, space marks it, o opens it, and d declines every marked row.

Related

• Set up a watch: the most common source of nominations.
• Plan with itineraries: plans, whose legs are nominations.
• The envelope: destinations: opens, opens-as and cap-per-pass.