Let's start with Ian.
Everybody, let's go ahead and get started.
My name is Joe Brockmire, and this panel is you can read up here unique challenges
and elected governing bodies for thoughts.
And so we are going to talk probably about,
I'm going to try to keep us through about half the session for OSI, if we can,
because there are a couple other things that I'd like to address,
or less, half or less.
So let's go ahead and I'm sure the audience probably has a question or three among them.
So anyway, my name is Joe Brockmire, as you can see from the sweater,
custom.
I write for LWN, but I'm not here necessarily in an LWN capacity,
and I'm going to let each of the panel introduce themselves,
so Ian would like to go ahead and start.
Sure, Ian Kelling here.
FFF president, as of this year, earlier this year,
and I've been working at the FFF for the past eight years or so,
and just paying attention to free software and open source
around the time when OSI started, so.
I mean, it's debrient.
I am currently in temporarily the interim executive director for OSI,
have a long history in the community.
I've done a lot of advocacy in the public sector,
worked at universities, and I have a great affection for the topic.
Thanks.
This, I'm Richard Fontana.
I'm a lawyer.
I currently work for IBM as of January 1st.
I worked at Red Hat for mostly Red Hat for many years,
and my job at IBM is supporting Red Hat.
I also, I was the first OSI board director elected
by the individual membership, I think.
And I have, I sort of, I think I ran,
did I run like two or three times, something like that?
And then, you know, one election to the board,
so I kind of served on the OSI board for several years,
and then then stepped down, or the rules of the OSI,
and last year, as you can see here, last year,
as well, Bradley, I ran for the board again,
but did not, did not, was not seated on the board.
And yeah, I think that's, that's a good enough introduction for me.
So, I'm Bradley Kune.
I'm from Software Freedom Conservancy.
I'm the policy fellow there.
I've been involved in open source and pre-suffer governance since 1997.
And I've thought about all different governance structures
that you could have, or should have, or don't have, or would want to have.
It is a very difficult topic.
But I think the fundamental difficulty with it is,
you have micro constituencies.
When you have a larger electorate, the politics play out a little bit more
straight forwardly than these micro electorates.
So, I, like Richard, ran in one of the OSI electoral districts
that used to exist last year.
I ran in the affiliate district, and I still do not know
how many votes I got, and no one will tell me.
All right.
So, I hope nobody in the audience is uninformed.
There was an OSI election.
There was a little bit of controversy a little bit.
And the recent announcement folks may or may not have seen
because that was late last week or midweek wasn't it?
So, OSI is an answer not going to do an election this year.
I don't know if everybody saw that announcement or not,
but they're rethinking the way that they're going to appoint board members
and haven't come up with that just yet.
But let's go ahead and talk through briefly kind of what happened
with the election last year and the difficulties of figuring out
who should be voting in those elections and who should be able
to seat on the board your constituencies and things like that
and would like to start.
Ian would like to start.
Yeah, I'd like to start by saying, I mean, we're here at Faustem
and what are those letters sent for?
Free and open source.
So, of course, it matters what those words mean.
And that's a unique role that free software foundation
and the OSI play is trying to define those.
So, I think it's incredibly important.
What they mean and they're decided by people and who are those people?
Those are people that are elected to the boards that have the highest authority
over those organizations.
So, I just want to start out by saying that that's sort of the stakes
is really about why we're all here.
So, yeah, even higher level than any specific organization.
Yeah.
Did anyone else fall in?
Sure.
So, I was a question again.
So, let me clarify something because there was a very recent announcement.
So, a little bit more context, Richard and I served in the board together.
I was the last board member to be appointed before the elections.
At the time, I was doing a lot of work with government.
I didn't really know anyone in the board was not an insider
and they approached me because they were getting increasing numbers of requests from government agencies
to help them.
So, they were looking for someone with help.
When Richard was elected, I had never met him and I was completely intimidated
because I didn't know that he was a clean person.
I just knew him by reputation.
The announcement earlier this week came that a recommendation I had made to the board
to pause the elections because last year was pretty rough.
And I hadn't actually thought I would still be the executive director that's certainly
by FaZe and but I was.
And over the holidays, I looked at the fact that we were facing a new election.
We had necessarily learned all of our lessons from last years.
And encouraged the board to pause the election this spring and to stand up a working
group with some public input to revisit the elections.
And do you mind if I take a minute to give you some background on why?
So, I want to speak from my own experience not necessarily as OSI's official representative.
I'm not the board so I'm not speaking for the board.
But my experience was this that we decided that we're going to do an elections.
We had a couple of assumptions.
One was that OSI would build a large membership base to form the electorate.
Within one year we had 350 members and today we have almost 500.
That was not the kind of growth or representative democracy.
I think that they had hoped so I was very concerned about that being representative.
The other concern was that the year that I was elected, there were three women in the board.
There were two people represented the global south.
And after the 2020, 12 elections, there hasn't been a single person from Africa, South America, Asia, Japan, India as was represented.
And so the idea of having popular elections didn't exactly work out the way we had hoped.
And that's why I asked the board if we could please consider doing a working group and revisit the elections.
It's a difficult thing to do I know is controversial.
I'm sorry it took a while.
I wasn't there a year ago and I wasn't involved in the process.
But I just wanted to kind of shed some light on why the recent announcement and the reflection.
And there's an obligation to the organization that we try to fulfill it.
I just want to clarify one thing.
You said that wasn't the 350 to 500.
Yeah.
Wasn't what they were looking for.
Two few or too many.
Two few.
Okay.
I mean, who wanted to, you know, who were serving a global?
And let's bear in mind that all three of these, I believe all three of us, US-based organizations,
consider ourselves to have a global remit.
You know, we have an obligation to the universe and so we've not.
I'm happy that we have equal representation from Europe and the US and the board.
But it doesn't really represent the scope of what people are looking for open source to solve today.
And all sectors of society.
I don't remember what the question was, but I think the question.
I mean, there's many things we could talk about.
What happened last year could just quite complicated.
And actually you should read Joe's article or multiple articles about that.
Topic, which are very well written, I think.
But, you know, I mentioned that I had served on the OSI board in the past and won these elections.
I served because I won these elections or I won these elections on the OSI board decided to, in recognition of that,
those election victories in the sense.
The OSI board decided in its discretion to appoint, because the OSI is not a membership organization,
but it has, you know, guaranteed member representatives on the board or didn't in the past.
But I will admit that, you know, I have wondered why did I actually win those three elections in the past.
I think it's possible that it had something to do with name recognition among the individual membership group or the ones and the individual members who decided to vote.
Although I don't know much about who the individual members actually are.
And I will be honest, I'm not sure that I ran for the best reasons in the past.
Last year, though, I actually had very good reasons to run.
My decision kind of started out at Fauston last year, because Bradley started talking to me about the idea.
And I moderated a panel here, which mostly sort of like critiquing the OSI ID.
And my views on the OSI ID were sort of deeply affected by some of the views that were on that panel that I was moderating.
And so Bradley and I decided to come up with this reform platform, which is almost, or maybe unique in OSI election history.
I don't know, you know, people running for the OSI board would have platforms, but they were, frankly, including mine.
They were kind of platitudinous if that's a correct word.
They were sort of saying, you know, here's my achievements and here's why I'm involved in open source.
And here's why I think the OSI is so important, blah, blah, blah.
We actually had a set of planks for suggestions for reforms that we thought the OSI should implement, because we thought that the OSI was doing certain things.
You know, incorrectly or sub-optimally.
And so for the first time out of like four times or whatever, I decided I had a good reason to run for the OSI board.
And again, we could talk a lot about what happened last year, but the main thing that happened was that a vote took place,
but we never actually saw the, in a sense, we never saw who won the election.
We never, the individual and affiliate members never actually got their voice reflected because the OSI chose to ignore the direct results.
And they excluded Bradley and me and another person who didn't meet a certain deadline in time because we refused to,
yeah, we didn't, so what happened was we were asked to sign a board agreement right after the voting took place,
but before the victors were announced and that had never been done before.
It doesn't really make sense to ask someone to sign a board agreement if they're just a candidate for elections.
That was a requirement that was created on the spot in the sense after the voting was concluded.
So that resulted, because one of our planks on a reform platform was that we were opposed to the current form of the board agreement.
We did not sign the board agreement in the form in its official form.
We revised, we've each had different revisions of it.
And so we submitted that revised board agreements.
Those were not accepted by the OSI and so we were excluded from the vote, from the vote talent.
And so we don't know, we can kind of play some antics here about what it means to win an election in that kind of context.
But I think in a kind of plain sense, we don't know who actually won the election because we never saw the results.
Yeah, I don't want to belabor the point because I know I heard you Joe that you don't want to spend too much time on OSI.
So I'll try to be the briefest of the four here on this point.
By the way, we've heard from the judges and we've decided to allow platitudes.
Okay, great. Yes, excellent.
Yeah, and I think I agree with everything Fontana said, Richard Fontana said and probably 90% of what website for sure.
I think the most fascinating thing about the OSI elections throughout their history from when they were instituted was they were not a change of the bylaws of the open source initiative.
The elections were advisory and they were always advisory and it was documented that they were advisory, which meant the elections were held.
There was an affiliate district, there was a member district, the votes were separate, the people who could vote were separate.
The affiliate district, by the way, is all non-profit organizations, open source projects sort of actually kind of a haphazard group of about 200 of them who elected who were in the district I was in.
Richard, I understood that this was a pivotal moment in OSI's history because it was the first time as Richard pointed out that anybody around a platform that was contentious and the OSI ID had made it contentious because the OSI basically had never done anything contentious before the OSI ID.
So there was now a very contentious election before that.
And we, as the election was going on, there were a series of just big mistakes, which were just through not now fees but bundling.
And then there was one mouthpiece and thing, which is not that important.
But in the end, it would have been okay.
And we were actually okay with the idea that if the OSI said, look, Richard and Bradley had the most votes, we don't know if we did because the ballots were tampered with.
But if they'd said, look, these people got the most votes, but we don't think for the right people for the OSI and our rules allow us to ignore the results of the election.
But instead of doing that, the OSI download and you can talk more about the tonal qualities of this, but they downloaded the vote ballots from the election platform.
Deleted the previous election and then rerun it election.
And they were using a platform that was designed so that people could send in votes and that the organization whose election was happening wouldn't be able to do that.
So they had actually canceled that election and run one where they were the only voter using the tampered ballots.
And so we felt that was a very inappropriate thing to do.
There's a petition that you can still sign asking the OSI just to release those results.
I think everything the OSI wants to do next is a great idea.
Everything Dev is pitched is a good steps one through N to figure out what to do next, but they haven't done steps zero, which is simply published the results of the past election.
So we know what actually happened.
All right.
So let's move forward now a little bit because I think this is an interesting question.
The OSI is unique in that.
Most of the 501C3 organizations represent specific open source communities.
You've got Python.
You've got Ruby.
You've got, you know, you know who your constituents are because they are the contributors.
They're the users, et cetera.
And I think there's a big difference of opinion between, say, maybe Bradley and Deb or somebody, about who are the constituents of OSI and how do you determine that?
So how do you figure out who should really have their voice heard or considered when you,
because I heard like during the OSI, AID process.
We're trying to build a, I'm not going to use the word big tent because that's been spoiled recently.
But we're trying to consider the opinions of people who haven't ordinarily been involved in open source.
And a lot of people said, oh, wait a minute.
Your constituency isn't them.
It's us, right?
So how do you figure that out as an organization now?
And who would like to start it then?
I think I have a question.
All right.
There's a difference between the open source AI definition, which is a specific project.
And the general remit of who the constituency is for open source.
There's going to be some overlap.
We had the, some of the contention came in that this is the first time OSI had work with people that weren't just focused on open source software.
To work on the open source AI definition, which is something that OSI took on that was very complex and very ambitious.
We took it on because we were concerned about the outfall and part for open source.
We had to call in people from other domains that we don't naturally work with.
AI practitioners, data scientists.
And some of the really difficult conversations came down with folks who said if something's going to be open,
it should all be open in that includes data, right?
This is a hard line that some of the folks in the open source community drew.
And when I spoke to people like from Ulutur AI that forked the open AI code to create a nonprofit to make sure that it really was open,
they said, no, we don't want the data.
It's dirty.
We don't know where the IP came from, so we don't want in the definition.
And I don't think we necessarily did a good job of creating a culture where we had some conversations.
So by the time the outcome was made, the people had an appreciation for the positions.
So that's tricky.
So there was some specific constituencies that people in that community that we hadn't normally worked with.
But generally, I have to tell you my view of the constituency that OSI serves has really been colored by my last 15 years of experience in open source.
I started.
I spent six years at Open State University's Open Source Lab.
And we hosted scores of really high impact open source communities.
We hosted the Linux kernel for years.
We hosted the Linux foundations infrastructure early on.
Mozilla foundations infrastructure.
And we were doing meaningful work.
And my view of who we served was really centered around software,
centered around industry, centered around specific communities that were clear to me.
But over time, and particularly when I was at Red Hat, and this sort of precipitated me going back to work in civil society again.
Because I started doing work with the UN.
I started realizing the work.
I worked with Remi on humanitarian open source software.
And I worked in the public sector.
And I realized that the breadth and the reach of open source software today really is quite global.
And the constituency we're serving are also people that are in areas that are underserved.
That wouldn't that struggle with power and clean water.
And yet we still see projects that stand up.
That's out of our view, you know, if you're living in a warm house.
So I see a very global constituency.
I think the thing that's critical is that you just need to understand your mission and understand who your mission serves.
And then your obligation is to the institution to execute on the mission.
And you figure out the governance that will help reflect being sensitive to how you meet those needs.
Let me see if I can start.
Is that platitudinous?
No.
Okay.
Thank you.
I do want to see if I can sharpen that though a little bit.
And I just ask you like.
Do you consider the OSI's constituency open source developers globally?
Or is it bigger than that?
Well, bigger than just.
The development of the people who create open source.
Is it bigger than that?
No, I think it is broader than that.
There's a bit of, and we've voiced this.
I think when we excited the mission.
There's a whole ecosystem.
And we have that really as many foundations do.
We have that needle that's red.
We have sponsors.
And for funding.
And yet we're not obligated.
I mean, we're talking about meta.
We thank you Simon for those comments.
We lost meta's funding that year.
You know, so we understand that the end game, the who the mission is supporting.
And that's going to include a broad ecosystem, not just of developers.
But also, you know, people working in commercial areas.
People working in humanitarian efforts.
It's much broader than that.
I think it's articulated in the mission.
You could have lost meta for any reason.
I mean, they're usually scraping around for money.
So you never know.
So I'm curious, you know, who else has a thought about what OSI's constituency should be?
Richard?
Yeah, so I mean, it's an interesting question because I don't know if it ever occurred
to me to ask that question.
Even though I had this history with the OSI and the OSI board, I kind of agree with Deb.
I mean, I've always, if the question had been posed to me in the past, I would have assumed,
well, OSI is constituents.
OSI aspires to a worldwide global constituency of basically everyone.
It's not certainly not just developers.
There is a viewpoint that the OSI should be just, you know, serving or representing developers.
That is not, like, that is on a mainstream OSI viewpoint.
And it isn't what the OSI has actually done certainly.
Certainly not developers.
I think maybe users and that sort of sounds a little closer to the, to the FSF's mission, I suppose.
But users as maybe is maybe closer.
But I think it's just the, as I would have thought about it, I think if someone had asked me the question,
it's really the entire world.
Because the entire world is touched in some way by open source software.
And the, you know, the governance mechanisms that the OSI experimented with evolved adopted were maybe sort of a, you know,
a clumsy or kind of crude way of trying to get, you know, some involved in representation that reflected that global constituency.
But, but I think the constituency never really quite matched the governance.
I see him really was to get into this.
I'll be very brief.
I'll be very brief, actually.
I, so I'm very much a US nonprofit geek.
I don't a lot about nonprofit around the world, but my expertise is in the US where I was, unfortunately, born.
And this is unfortunate.
You were born or you were.
Wow, you got me.
It's true.
Is that my demerit for my phone going off?
Yes.
I apologize.
I deserve that.
But yeah.
So as, as the website, the, these non-profit charities in the US are supposed to serve a very broad
constituency.
In fact, they are required legally to serve the general public, which I've always loved because that's
a phrase the IRS uses and it's also in our favorite license.
But yes, the services to the general public.
And I say that as the whole world, the, the US non-profits 5133 should serve the world.
I had always assumed that the reason the OSI left the bylaws the way it was with this idea that the
elections were purely advisory was because they might have to make the tough decision that somebody who won a popular
election either in the affiliate district or the member district was not somebody that could trust to serve in service
of the general public.
So I, I guess that's what they thought of me.
And Richard, if we happen to a one, I don't know.
But, but I think of it that way of like that's what the IRS requires in the United States for you to get a charity
to get all these tax benefits in the US no taxes paid, US donors get tax deductions.
So I, I think that the constituency is the entire public, not just the open source public.
It's, it's the entire public and the mission that was filed in the 1023 when they find up.
Sorry, that's such a bureaucratic way of thinking about that, but that's how I think of it.
All right.
Yeah.
I think what Bradley and Richard said makes sense.
There's like a broad general public that software effects, you know, the whole world.
I mean, there are people who are avowed non software users in communities.
I wouldn't say that those people are specifically included necessarily.
So, and I do want to respect them.
And, and then when you, when you think about that, you think, well, that's such a broad responsibility.
You know, it's so strange to have a small group of people, you know, trying to have such a broad effect for
so many people that they don't know haven't heard from, haven't, don't have experience meeting all of humanity.
So it is, it's a strange situation, but, so, and I've thought about that over the years, like, well, how could that be better?
And, mostly, I thought about it in the context of the FSF, because that's where I have an actual power to effects change more.
And, you know, in a lot of times, I've just come to the conclusion that there's not a obvious practical better.
The governance structure to step into.
And, but I've been encouraged by the FSF having some sort of skin in the game, if you will, by being funded broadly by individuals.
And, with a mission that directly deals with people and the software that they're using.
So, I guess that's the, the biggest thing I wanted to say, but I mean, also want to say, I noticed, Deb saying that the first time that OSI idea was the first time OSI talks directly with people not focused on open source.
And then, you know, but the people that software effects are mostly not people who are focused on the software at all.
So, perhaps OSI needs to continue to try to broaden.
Yeah, that's all I wanted to mention.
All right.
Quick poll, I'm just curious.
How many folks in the audience have burning questions for this group so that I can allocate the reasonable amount of time for audience questions?
So, okay, so there, what's that?
Okay, so there are a number of folks.
All right.
I think if we've beaten the OSI horse enough, I'd like to switch topics a little bit to another governance thing that is recently cropped up.
So, a community that I'm fairly familiar with, I imagine most of you are at least passingly familiar with Fedora has historically allowed people to vote in FESCO.
So, Iimental-Center Engineering Steering Council elections.
If you had a FESCO count and a FESCO membership, any other SIG group or something like that, which is pretty loosey goesuy and not super well maintained.
It's not like Debbie and for example, which has a very stringent Debbie and developer path.
You know, the fast stuff was fairly loosey goesuy, but it seemed to work for Fedora.
but it seemed to work for Fedora.
Recently, what came to light was one group
was dulling out temporary memberships
to allow people to vote when they said,
it's too hard to be in a sig.
And so I'd like to ask a group for a group
like Fedora that is kind of got both the corporate sponsored
thing going on.
And hard time, how do you figure out who gets to vote?
And how do you measure it?
And when they don't have stringent membership groups and things
like that.
I have a modified version of the Winston Churchill
quote, which was the democracy
is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I find with false projects and false nonprofits,
self-propeutuating boards are the worst form of government
except for all the others.
And I really think you mentioned Debbie
and sort of in the middle there, the Fedora
sounds like it's kind of going through things.
Debbie and has gone through before in a number of different ways.
Debbie and it's just so unique as the only international
false republic with a constitution and a political system
that's been able to survive having that kind of system.
I serve on the board of directors where I work
at the software freedom conservancy and where
a self-propeutuating board.
The OSI has technically always been a self-propeutuating
board.
The OSF is still a self-propeutuating board more or less.
Other is that member thing, but you can explain.
And most open-source projects, it's a phrase I don't like
to do accuracy thing where people who show up end up in charge.
And I think we're still using that model
because we haven't found an electorate-based,
republic, middle-art republic model that doesn't
isn't gameable in this way.
And I think it has to do with the micro constituency problem.
There's just not enough voters for it to create a political
structure that will sustain the things that a republic needs
to be sustained.
OK.
I'd like, yeah, I was going to ask for Richard,
because this may wind up on your plate and some form anyway.
Yeah, I have to admit, I'm not sure I was even aware of this change
possibly because I was aware of it on some conscious level,
but it was too boring for me to pay my attention to.
So one of the things I do provide legal support for Fedora
in a certain official sense, like the Fedora.
So Fedora is, I think the interesting things about Fedora
governance are wrestling with having an actual big community,
which is actually mostly non-red headers.
But it is a creature in a sense of red hat, red hat, controls,
and owns the branding, the trademarks, red hat
employees, the Fedora project lead.
That's probably not the right name for the position.
But it's always said, OK.
Yeah.
And so the challenge is how do you,
it's actually, in a way, I can think of a very unique project,
because it has the looming corporate presence.
But on the other hand, that the history is one of largely,
as I have always seen it, largely stepping back,
and stepping back in the sort of corporate management
sets, and letting the engineers and volunteers
who are not red hat employees, and engineers
who are red hat employees, kind of figure things out for themselves.
And that is a very interesting experiment
that has not been really talked about much,
but it's something that I have observed a lot.
And how do you, I have noticed that in these elected
Fedora bodies, you mostly have red haters,
like red haters of the ones who red hat engineers,
the ones who tend to run for these positions,
they tend to get elected, doesn't look great
if you conceive of Fedora as being this thing that
aspires to being something much bigger than red hat,
and in fact, it is bigger than red hat,
because of all the contributors who are non-red haters.
So this is something that the Fedora project has for,
I guess, decades now, wrestled with and tried to figure out,
and I think it's still very much a work in progress,
but a very interesting one.
Anybody else have thoughts?
No? No? All right.
All right.
I think let's go ahead and turn over to some audience questions
and so that we can make sure we get everybody
from the audience addressed.
Karen, what is the recommendation for the microphones?
Just repeat the questions.
I think it's better if people are chatting out
and you're good.
Okay, great.
Who would like to go first?
Let's see some hands.
Who's got questions?
Yes.
I didn't understand what's the plan now for you,
for the agency's plans,
so are you going to modify the banos,
or is what system,
how are you going to make it into demochetical lots?
Thank you.
Did I question for you?
I think you're a guest on the show.
All right.
So the question is, what's the path forward now?
So you've positive election, what's going to happen?
Are you going to amend the baili laws?
So I want to make an extra comment about why
the baili laws never changed,
because we did want to see if this would be a successful process.
And because changing the baili laws for a non-profit
under this construct in the United States
is consequential and it can actually
send up a little red flag that says,
re-evaluate whether or not it should be a non-profit.
So we wanted to take it very seriously.
This is not a play to hold back
so we could not bring in someone that we thought
and it would be unethetical to the organization.
So the path forward is this.
We're standing up a working group,
and the board led working group.
It'll return by the board meeting here in the month of February
with its charter and with its work plan
to explain how they're going to go about revisiting
the best way to bring in new board members.
So they could come back and say,
we really should do elections.
We'll do it differently.
They could go back and say,
well, what we want to do is find a way to create new vehicles
to get member input.
They'll evaluate maybe look at other models,
like open-rights group is one that was suggested
where it's also a self-appointed board
but they have methods to be able to get recommendations.
We'll probably also consider asking the OSI board
to do a thorough public job of describing
where they see the gaps in their own board constituency.
Where they do two years ago would have been great to say,
you know what, we really need someone who understands AI
on a board this year and asked our constituency for ideas.
But what I do is make sure that we have methods and means
to collect those things and that disappoint people again.
So you'll see the timelines and the charter published,
I can't really exact date,
but either the end of February or the first week in March,
that'll be the first step.
Then they have a finite period of time,
probably September or the latest, probably early,
but September is the date we've said in September
to come back with recommendations to the board review.
This is also going to give us a chance
to onboard the new executive director.
I think we'll have someone hopefully next month
and then they'll have an opportunity to participate
in that process and really bring it into execution.
So that's the current plan.
I just want to say I read the plan
and I like the extra detail and color just put on it.
It sounds like an excellent plan.
I'm glad you're undertaking it.
As I said earlier, it's a great step
one through end.
I'd like to ask you now, will you just step zero?
Will you either clean up the old mistakes
that have been made?
Either publish the unanimized ballots
or publish the on-campure election results.
You have a petition in front of you with hundreds of signatures.
I think about a dozen of them
or from former OSI directors themselves.
I believe that Richard and I won.
We're now looking for board seats now.
We just want the past cleaned up.
Will you publish the results?
So that was a board decision that preceded me
and the board would need to make that decision.
I think they were a public on the record
and said that that wasn't their plan,
but I'm happy to take it back to the point
of them to discuss it with them.
As exactly the doctor, will you advocate
to your board to do it?
To be honest, last year during election process,
I was an involved in the process.
I didn't run the process.
So I have a very neutral opinion about this.
I have a lot of respect for the board
had to go through those days and they have
respite reasons or whatever reasons they had,
but I will advocate for them thinking about it.
But I don't have an opinion on it because I don't.
In part, because I don't know what it will serve
in terms of moving forward, but I respect your curiosity.
And I'll promise to bring it up in the next board meeting.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Oh, I'll add that OSI, as a last month,
I looked, it still set on their front page.
Become a member so you can vote.
That's why I became a member.
And basically, I felt pretty lied to after the last election
because my vote got thrown in the trash.
And it doesn't seem like it's a extremely controversial
decision to just do what you said you were going to do.
So that's all.
All right.
I see in the back kind of a pink shirt, I think it is.
I can't really tell with the, yeah.
I have a lot of questions on the work we do.
Are you contact with, we can need a foundation
on the recent changes that they did for the electoral process.
For a short recap, the foundation has a separate
preventing board, but it has assumed a majority of community
elected members.
And there were some controversy in the process.
So now there is a short, least-take of process where the board
keeps the voters, the candidates that they are happy with,
and the electorate picks one of those.
So the question of the audience is, are we aware of what
a media's recent publishing of their electoral process?
And will we go take it absolutely?
That's part of what you can help us with here
is give us reference models for other way to do things.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Yes, you there.
There wasn't controversy of the last week
media election because a couple of candidates in the short
place were removed.
The actual reasons are not.
No, but there was some speculation that it was
pretty to do their use.
The fact that they were made up on making cars being present
with, I mean, it's not for get status question.
So my question is, is there anything to be done
for organizations that have a global beat
by some legal basis thing that you asked?
So you avoid this kind of threat from affecting their functioning
or their elections?
So the question was, basically, is there anything that can be
done for organizations based in the US that have a global
constituency to deal with possible legal threats that
only really exist in the US right now?
And can I feel one?
Yes, all right.
So as a US-based person, also, unfortunately,
is Bradley said, unfortunately, not both,
can't really.
But I would say that a lot of organizations, if things
don't change in the United States and the very near future,
should be thinking really hard about either a sister
organization or relocating to a less contentious country.
And I'd be curious what you all think about that.
I mean, I'm going to get sort of probably a lot of debbing
developers coming out to me saying that the debbing
processes, there's problems in nebium, which we all know there are.
But I really, debbing seems like lightning in a bottle to me.
It's magic that it is a constitutional international
republic, and it's still been running for 35 some years, I think.
And I wish I knew how to recreate that,
because I think that's the right structure for open source
and free software.
It doesn't have any official entity that it's
under affiliate, it doesn't work with SFC, it does work with SPI,
it does work with a bunch of EVs and Germany and so forth.
And it tends to be the case that all these organizations end up
legally existing wherever the original people that started them.
Katie is an EV in Germany, because most of the original
Katie developers are there.
It's a five-aliency three because mostly original developers were in
the United States at the time.
So I think this is a basically an unsolved problem.
I spent a lot of time working in my day job.
It's all for freedom conservancy trying to figure out what we have
lots of our member projects that we serve.
They're like, well, I don't necessarily just want to be in the US
for all the reasons Joe was saying and others.
And we're like, well, you can go to another nonprofit.
But why don't I want to be in the Netherlands?
I don't want to be in Germany.
I want to be everywhere.
And I also want to be in the US as well.
And I've talked to all my colleagues who've started nonprofits
around the world.
There's kind of this solution unless you become an agency of the UN.
We kind of need to came in islands for open source.
So Jed, Deb, you have been a board member of the Eclipse
Foundation, and they're not a charitable nonprofit,
but they are an example of one that has reconstituted itself
as a European organization.
Yes.
So do you want to comment on that?
No, I mean, I think that if we have more time,
like, I think there's a more interesting question
lurking here that Bradley was kind of hinting at,
which is that there is a tension between these structures
that get these formal structures that get created
to help communities or projects and the projects themselves.
And like years ago, I gave a talk here that was very critical
of foundations or at least like trade association foundations.
And I think that was kind of rooted in some of those concerns.
So there is a kind of deep question here,
maybe not so relevant to the OSI or even the FSF about what
is the point of these kinds of administrative entities
and the sense that spring up above some sort of organic,
organically developing community or software development project.
So I, as you were saying with the constituents,
was like, the people who were voting was much less,
which is like 300 or 600 people.
Now, the FSF is not going to last time.
We have some planning to do it.
And this is a highly confidential in the sense
that the OSI, the FSF, is a degree of this sort
of a different animal problem.
This initials like 30s and 30s, which
generally the software developer are not really excited about.
So which is very important.
It's like the mother and the teacher, a mother
who you take for granted and the teacher,
you are like always obliged to.
So why we are expecting that OSI or FSF is going to have
that many people as of the point.
I'm sure I'm the sixth point.
I guess the point was that when OSI,
you need to repeat the question.
I'm sorry.
OK, so the question is around.
And to give an example of Python foundation,
having about, which is 900 people voting,
and it's more specific, and it's different,
and then a narrow limit to OSI.
Why would we expect to be there to be more voters?
Well, I think OSI expected that because I
don't know why I look at the AFF who has tens of thousands.
We had a notion that we would have broader representation.
That was our aspiration.
We found out that really did work out the way we thought,
just because of the global reach of OSI.
Membership was not the same.
I mean, I figured you'd have at least one voter for every license.
And that's no.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
So, yeah.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Simon has a question.
Simon's going to tell me, no, they don't really
have that many licenses.
Yeah, Simon.
I'm trying to relate some examples of how to run these sorts of presses.
So my favorite at the moment is open rights for the UK
who uses a list of candidates for the world that
are using, considers the company's various constituencies.
And I know both FSF and SFC have self-controls.
And I want to hire you if you get to know how your guarantee
you go representing your constituencies to regard that professor.
OK.
So the question and comment was he wants to know how SFC and others
are guaranteeing their constituencies by appointed boards?
Yeah.
I'll do a first.
I think basically I've already answered this question.
So I'm not sure why Simon's asking it again.
But as I said, I think self-propecuated leadership groups are the worst form
of government except for all the others for open source and free software projects.
I've not been able to come up with another model other than Debbie
and which I've already said, I don't think anybody's been able to reproduce that.
And I wish they would.
It's interesting that you mentioned open rights group because they have a similar structure
to Wikimedia, which we've heard from two people in Hawaii and says having problems
we're using that structure.
I think, again, I'm kind of bureaucratic on this, unfortunately.
But the only way you can stay a charitable organization in the United States
is having filed a form 1023 that states exactly what your mission is and prove to the regulators
that it serves the general public and then you are audited every year and you have to file
forms every year to explain exactly to both the public and the regulatory body how you've
served the general public.
I believe transparency is just so essential in these situations, which is why I think it's
so unfortunate that OSI in the last election that they did refused to be transparent.
Yeah, I mean, I think kind of what I said earlier is it's a little bit impossible
but to have such a broad mission to represent everybody in the world.
But your question...
I said can you request a question?
Because I know you do not do it.
Yes.
Okay, yeah, but yeah, that's why I got you.
So, when we were, when I had to think through, you know, what's the right way for us to get
new board members and I heard Deb say new members.
But, you know, the question if you're thinking from a governance perspective is not just a new board
members but is even the existing ones.
Who's the right people to govern the organization?
And so I would say, you know, in the nonprofit realm there is a big...
If you read the literature, there's a big emphasis on recruiting and having a pipeline
a process that can repeat itself and that way you're constantly...
You're not neglecting this issue.
You're constantly bringing in new people.
It helps...
For most nonprofits, it helps to get fresh ideas and fresh energy.
That's all good things.
But, you know, for organizations like the FSF and probably OSI2, it's also really good to have
maybe more than other nonprofits, existing people who have long experience and rooted values.
So, what we did was we set up a process which we documented extremely thoroughly in...
ahead of time internally, then we published a...
Well, actually two different documents explaining it to the public in a abbreviated form,
which I could summarize as put out a call for people who wanted to join our board.
And then that call would have some questions for those people.
Those answers would get vetted or get examined by the existing board.
People with plausible answers moved through to being published a list of people.
And then we opened the discussion forum to discuss those people and actually have...
Anybody in our community asked them questions about their...
You know, candidacy, how they...
Whether they would be good board members.
And that whole process was really enlightening.
Really, really worked well.
I mean, it took...
We had a lot of engagement.
We learned a bit.
Basically, you know, people are not that interested in governance generally.
So, you have to design the process in a way that people can jump in and make a contribution that's valuable in evaluating potential candidates.
And we think that happens.
And I actually think I would like to do some writing about the whole process in reflecting on it.
So, I really appreciate the question.
All right.
Sorry, we're very close on time.
We have several hands up.
We only have time for one.
Can you just read the access to the...
I think this important is the nomination phase.
Yeah, as I said, I missed the nomination phase.
Yeah, that was super important.
So, we took nominations from the general public.
People could self-nominate or nominate others.
And because one of the things we realize is not everybody was part of our community.
Not everybody.
There might be candidates who...
Wonderful candidates who weren't even interested had never heard of the F stuff,
who we would need to go out and scout and recruit.
So, yeah.
All right.
So, I'm going to call it actually, so that was...
We're down to like one minute.
So, please, everybody.
I really want to say I appreciate everybody for being here.
I appreciate that we've all been pretty...
You know, kind about the issue that I think had raised some feelings.
And, yeah, just thank you all for being here.
You have like 30 seconds.
We'd like to thank you for being our moderator.
I think I can speak for everybody to say we all appreciate your journalism.
And that's why we wanted you as our moderator.
I think everybody would agree.
You've done a wonderful job and we really appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, and thanks for everybody being here.
Do you want to make a...
I don't know if you'd like to be here.
I don't know if you'd like to have a crowd.
So, there's one more to come.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
Okay, I'll take a closer.
I'll just be here now.
Okay.
Oh, no minute to second mic.
Okay.
I don't know if we'd like to have a crowd.
Leave it on.
Sorry.
I think we need to do a good job.