Engaging with the OSI Elections 2022.1
Every year, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) holds an election to add a few new directors to its board of directors. This year, I decided to try and engage with that process, asking the candidates some real questions.
This is an account of that, which I’m hoping is food for thought for any and all other people who care about FOSS governance, and it’s also a record of what happened, since I expect that to be soon forgotten if I don’t write it down myself. It’s been more than a month, yeah, so … ancient history. I had a thing. Still, historical record and all.
Background
Ostensibly, these elections are serious affairs. The OSI is high-profile organization, with a robust list of Big Tech sponsor companies funding it. And “open source” as a term is the OSI’s property: the OSI is in charge of the trademark and defends it when it is misused; the OSI also maintains the formal “open source” definition and the list of licenses that you are permitted to call “open source”. That’s actually not a massive list of duties, so you might well wonder why the OSI is so high-profile to begin with; I think that’s one of the big philosophical questions, certainly worth revisiting (especially with regard to running for governance positions) but, for the time being, suffice it to say that it’s where we (“we” meaning “FOSS in the general sense”) are.
Nevertheless, these elections kinda just plod through without a lot of interest or engagement. You might remember that in 2021, the election-management- or voting-system went a little haywire and the OSI had to redo the election. But, by and large, they aren’t really news when they happen. That’s in pretty stark contrast to the public back-and-forth that happens for Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections and the brouhaha over recent leadership “maneuvering” (scare quotes intentional) in the FSF.
The OSI board candidates can each write a candidacy-page text that gets put on the wiki, but it can say whatever they want. In short, to you the voter, there’s no genuine back-and-forth provided. No debates, no time allotted, no required position papers, etc. For the past few years, however, Luis Villa has made an effort to pose questions to the candidates. I think that’s great. Although not everyone answers, some do. But Villa is just one voter, and he doesn’t ask everything. And some of what he does ask is more of a “tell us in your own words” prompt than it is anything particularly drilling down on a specific point. So it’s not a real incisive process on those grounds.
Plus, this year I saw some things that concerned me about the ballot, and when I got the OSI’s “this much time until the election” email, I realized it was now or never. So this year was my first attempt to ask the candidates questions that I, as a vote-caster, wanted to know the answers to.
The ballot and the candidates
OSI membership itself is a little odd; I’m a student member, but I had to jump through a lot of hoops to even figure out how to join as a student member in the first place, and if I hadn’t been old-conference-pals with the then-OSI executive director I’m not sure I would have succeeded. Not a lot of info on the site; lotta dead links, etc. And even then, the process is basically trade-some-personal-email-based. That could use updating as well, but I digress.
The relevant point is that my “student” membership is a subclass of the “individual” membership. Individual members are people who have joined OSI of their own, personal accord. There is one other type of membership: “affiliate” membership, which is open to organizations (specifically, to other non-profit orgs, FOSS projects, user groups, and educational institutions). Affiliate members are institutions, but they are not the same as OSI corporate sponsors.
That matters because the OSI board is also a little odd, with four the seats chosen by the individual members and four chosen by the affiliate members, plus two more seats chosen by the other members of the board itself. Sponsors don’t get any seats. Add to that the fact that the individual-seat board members and the board-selected board members have a two-year term while the affiliate-seat board members have a three-year term.
Whatever. The relevant idea is that individuals and affiliates are separate memberships, and there is one election held for the individual-member board seats and a separate election held of the affiliate-member board seats. I can vote for “individual” seat candidates; I can’t vote for “affiliate” seats. The affiliate organizations get an organization-wide vote for the “affiliate” board seats; they do not get to vote on the “individual” board seats. And that’s by design.
Which brings us to this year’s candidates. Two individual seats were up for voting and two affiliate seats were up for voting. There’s an election page that currently has some of the details on it, but the pages of the candidates were only ever on the wiki (side note: don’t have two disjoint CMSes for your organization. It makes the baby pandas cry.)
[There used to be a blog post linking to all of the bio pages below but, for some reason I haven’t been able to track down an answer to, OSI pulled down that page– //blog.opensource.org/meet-osis-2022-candidates-for-board-of-directors — and it’s not archived in Wayback Machine. I’ll update that if it reappears. I locally archived all the links below before posting this, so if those also vanish, lemme know.]
The individual candidates running for the 2 individual-voter seats were:
- Josh Berkus [candidacy page] (Red Hat)
- Amanda Brock [candidacy page] (OpenUK)
- Kevin Fleming [candidacy page] (Red Hat)
- Jim Hall [candidacy page] (unaffiliated)
- Tetsuya Kitahata [candidacy page] (unknown affiliation)
- Myrle Krantz [candidacy page] (Grafana)
- Hilary Richardson [candidacy page] (Google)
- Rossella Sblendido [candidacy page] (SUSE)
- Jean-Brunel Webb-Benjamin [candidacy page] (Kryotech)
Editorial note: at the moment, the above “candidacy page” links show the questions I eventually posed the candidates; feel free to not read those yet if you want to stay spoiler-free….
The affiliate candidates running for the 2 affiliate-voter seats were:
- Gael Blondelle [candidacy page] (Eclipse)
- Pamela Chestek [candidacy page] (unaffiliated; proposed by GNOME Foundation)
- George DeMet [candidacy page] (unaffiliated)
- Benito Gonzalez [candidacy page] (Unicon)
- Marco A. Gutierrez [candidacy page] (unaffiliated)
- Matt Jarvis [candidacy page] (OpenUK)
- Lior Kaplan [candidacy page] (Debian)
- Carlo Piana [candidacy page] (United Nations Technology Innovation Labs)
…and, just for comparison, the current board prior to Election Day was:
- Aeva Black {individual} (Microsoft)
- Megan Byrd-Sanicki {individual} – outgoing – (Google)
- Catharina Maracke {individual} (Lawyer; lists several associations with unclear professional-affiliation status)
- Josh Simmons {individual} – outgoing – (Salesforce)
plus:
- Thierry Carrez {affiliate} (OpenStack)
- Pamela Chestek {affiliate} – up for reelection
- Hong Phuc Dang {affiliate} (FOSSASIA)
- Italo Vignoli {affiliate} – outgoing – (The Document Foundation)
and:
- Justin Colannino {board-appointed} (Microsoft)
- Tracy Hinds {board-appointed; serves as Treasurer}
(Side note: it’s sometimes slightly tricky to come up with a real precise “employer”/”affiliation” tag to parentheticize next to each candidate; the meanings vary between individual and affiliate seats, and there are people who are self-employed, etc. It’s a spectrum.)
So, there we have it. As a matter of principle, I may care about the overall make-up of the OSI board, but as a voter I am offered input only on the “individual” board seats. So that’s where I focused my attention.
Issues
Before you even look at the candidate pages, a couple of thing stand out. First, there are two organizations who have multiple people running this year. There are two Red Hatters running on the same ballot, and there are two OpenUK ers running, with one of them running on the individual ballot and the other on the affiliate ballot. Slightly less noticeable is that there is a Googler running to fill a seat vacated by an outgoing Googler.
It’s clearly a problem for any one organization (for profit or otherwise) to hold on to a disproportionate number of seats on the OSI board. This is single-digit territory, mind you. That being said, some of these organizations are quite large and could hypothetically have people in totally disjoint divisions running, with different experiences, reporting to different supervisors, and operating in mutual isolation from one another. We just don’t know.
Furthermore, it’s arguably most problematic for the two OpenUK-ers who are running simultaneously for a seat on two different ballots, then somewhat less problematic for the two Red Hatters both running for an individual seat, and further less problematic for the Googler running as another Googler exits. That’s because the “individual” and “affiliate” voters are different constituencies; the individual-seat voters can see two Red Hatters on the ballot and say “yeah, we definitely need more diversity than THAT”, but the double-dipping maneuver goes more easily unnoticed when one candidate is presented to the individual voter block and the other candidate is presented to the affiliate voter block. That’s compounded by the fact that the affiliate “voters” vote at the organizational level; they’re more likely to cast those votes based on some internal organizational process that we just can’t know form outside.
The second thing that stands out is that one of the candidates for an “individual” seat is actually affiliated with one of the affiliate organizations. That’s a second red flag; the affiliate seats exist to give the affiliate organizations an institutional say in OSI operations. Affiliate employees and officers should definitely not be eligible to run for an “individual” seat for that reason. If they want to participate, they need to run for one of the affiliate seats that is set out in the bylaws for that purpose. Doubling down on the inappropriateness, this affiliate is OpenUK, who was also a red-flagged participant by virtue of running two candidates at the same time, on different ballots.
Moreover, the candidate in question (Brock) is, in fact, the CEO of the affiliate organization. Which is exponentially more problematic, even without the other two prior red flags.
The other thing to notice is that several candidates are employed by corporate sponsors of OSI. This, too, cedes a disproportionate degree of influence over OSI’s actions to one seat.
Last and certainly least — and I want to be generous in the way I phrase this — there are some candidates whose public profile maybe leaves a few open questions to be filled in. That’s not to say that one has to be formally associated with some Big Fancy FOSS HQ to participate in the OSI; far from it. In fact, I think it’s great that anyone can run, and I’m far more interested in the OSI hearing input from individual computer users than I am in giving yet another soapbox to a well-heeled commercial outfit that already has other ways to throw its weight around (and isn’t shy about using them). But some of the candidate’s candidacy pages are a tad sparse on detail, and it’s not immediately clear where they participate in the open-source community. So knowing more of that background information would go along way toward establishing how well-suited and interesting they ultimately are as a candidate.
So it’s a troubling ballot to look at. There’s an ostensibly non-profit organization that’s an official OSI affiliate trying to run its CEO as an individual candidate while also running a second member (a board director) on the appropriate, affiliate ballot in the same election. There’s also two financial sponsors running candidates on the individual ballot, one of them (Red Hat) running two candidates at the same time for the two open seats.
If you’re an individual voter at this stage, it looks rough. To be perfectly frank, OpenUK is violating multiple ethical principles here and clearly should not be allowed to run an officer (much less CEO) as an individual candidate. That, after all, in the entire reason that OSI has set out this distinction between “individual” and “affiliate” board seats in the first place; robbing the individual voters of their representation is blatantly wrong.
Only slightly less troubling is the organizations running multiple candidates at the same time; that raises questions about collusion or coordination on the part of the organization, which obviously would be unethical.
Finally, no financial sponsor ought to be allowed to run a candidate on the individual ballot unless that candidate will publicly agree to take steps to act solely on behalf of the individual voters, rather than the sponsor (I’m not trying to be overly specific about this risk; “recusal” and “conflict of interest” policy stuff is all I mean). This is an obvious-enough avenue to trouble that the OSI has theoretically adopted a conflict-of-interest policy … with a disclosure requirement. But they have not posted any disclosure statements since 2019. Why not? Dunno.
Assessment
So where do we go from here, if we’re an individual voter concerned about the governance of OSI? Well, Brock’s candidacy is egregiously unethical and should not have been allowed in the first place. But it has been allowed for 2022, so fixing that for the future is a matter of amending the broken bylaws … in the future. On the the sponsor-employee front, there is at least a conflict-of-interest policy to point towards and ask for clear answers. And on the multiple-candidates-from-one-organization front, although this also really does need to be fixed in the bylaws, we can at least raise the issue in public, and request some clear answers.
So that’s what I ultimately set out to do for 2022. But let’s save that (and an analysis of the candidacy pages, which factored into what questions I posted) for part II. This has gotten long enough already. Do feel free to contemplate what you would ask the candidates (and even to stay spoiler-free by not reading my own questions, if you’re that hardcore).
I know it’s easy to think that the little project-governance details don’t matter, but they’re important. Procedures matter; limits and checks on authority matter; equitable influence for all participants matter; honesty matters. Without an eye firmly fixed on those subjects, they can get eroded fast.
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