Nathan Willis: Engaging with the OSI Elections 2022.1
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 1st of May 2022 06:31:25 PM
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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.
[...]
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.
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Willis: Engaging with the OSI Elections 2022.1