OSI announces board election results

OSI announces board election results

Posted Apr 21, 2008 12:40 UTC (Mon) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: OSI announces board election results by tialaramex
Parent article: OSI announces board election results

The community has the ultimate recourse of ceasing to recognise this function.

Sooner or later, this kind of self-perpetuating and unaccountable Board of Directors tends to stray from its mission. Why wouldn't it? There's no outside accountability, and certainly no structural reason to do the right thing.

Dartmouth College, for example, once had a similar self-perpetuating Board of Trustees. In 1891, the alumni association reached an agreement with the trustees, and the trustees opened 5 of 12 board seats to election by the alumni. The alumni provided a significant amount of the College's funding, and wished to have a say in how it was run.

Today, the alumni hold 8 of 18 seats, with 3 of the alumni seats belonging to petition candidates. Personally, I don't like the petition candidates very much, but they were elected by vote of the alumni, and at 3 of 18 seats, they represent only a tiny shift in control.

So what is the Board of Trustees doing? They're attempting to add another 8 non-alumni trustees to the board. There's currently a court case over the 1891 agreement, and preliminary rulings have been in favor of the alumni association.

I've seen other, similar issues in local non-profits. Once you get a clique on the board, the appointment process becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Any attempt at "outside" influence is sharply rejected, because, after all, the insiders know best. Witness, for example, the history of ICANN.

If the OSI wishes to retain any kind of long-term credibility, they need to open their board. In particular, they should reserve a certain number of seats for election by two groups: (1) the core teams of major open source projects, and (2) representatives from major open source companies. This is tricky to do right, but without it, I doubt that the OSI will last another 10 years in any useful form.

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