OSI publishes election retrospective [LWN.net]

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has quietly published "takeaways" from its internal retrospective on the recent board of directors election as an update to the March blog post that announced the new members of the board. The election was controversial, in part, due to poor communication and OSI changing the election rules and disqualifying several candidates after the election finished. LWN covered the election and results in March. The update commits to improvements in communication and candidate selection:

What this election exposed was the need for the organization to also assess whether candidates were fully eligible to run and prepared to be seated on the board before voting begins. This is something we will add to the election timeline next year. While we have not finished figuring out all of the requirements for that assessment, part of it will be asking candidates to sign a Candidate Agreement at nomination time. We also have some ideas on ways for potential candidates to have more information even before submitting a nomination.

In a related note, there is a petition asking OSI to publish the "complete, unaltered" results of the board of directors election. Thanks to Josh Triplett for the tip on the petition.

to post comments

Retrospective was underwhelming (IMO)

Posted Apr 28, 2025 19:05 UTC (Mon) by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250) [Link] (1 responses)

I found this retrospective summary to be underwhelming; in particular the statements about 'improvements in communication' were related to 'inbound structured feedback' from OSI members to the OSI... but in the sequence of events related to the election, the primary issue in my opinion was *outbound* communication from the OSI. They made decisions and acted on those decisions without communicating them to anyone except the candidates (in some cases, not all), not to the members or the public. Those of us outside the candidate pool learned about those decisions from the candidates when they chose to talk about them on social media and other places.

Retrospective was underwhelming (IMO)

Posted Apr 30, 2025 4:58 UTC (Wed) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

I'd say underwhelming in several ways. Even before this update came out, people were asking OSI for redress of grievances and OSI was responding: "There will be a retrospective", which implies: "There will be 0 redress. We will write an article which has the premise that there WERE problems (now ancient history), and the only thing to do is make some changes to avoid them in the future." And that looks like what we got.

I don't know if the OSI board saw the petition at the time of their last meeting (usually the 3rd friday of each month), but it has gained most of its signatures after that meeting. I'm confident the OSI board will be aware of the petition and the new signatures by their next meeting. It will be a new consideration for them, and if they have some courage, they could decide to do something good. I will hold out some hope. Boards are often slow in deliberation and I would not rule out the possibility of it taking more than one meeting to decide something. Of course, the the OSI executive director could decide to publish the full vote at any time unless the board indicated they wanted to be in charge of that decision.

Petitions are a very imperfect method of expression. Some people have been adding a statement along with their signature in the git log and I've enjoyed reading them.

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 28, 2025 20:05 UTC (Mon) by if.gnu.linux (guest, #88877) [Link] (14 responses)

> “Since OSI introduced individual member and affiliate votes for some board seats in 2013, we have been in a continuous process of improving those elections.”

The fact that you only fixed how many “Member” and how many “Affiliate” seats there were after the nomination process was over shows that there is no progress.

> “Also, that it’s important to our supporters that feedback be clearly received and acknowledged, and that they receive word of any related board decision when one is made.”

What matters is how the decision was made. When the views of the candidates did not match those of the board of directors, it should have been questioned how the decisions were made that allowed them to be sidelined in the selection process.

> “The Board is working on a plan to reshape discussions with our supporters in order to realize better two-way communication.”

There was no two way communication. One side openly voiced the problems they saw and asked for explanations, while the other side chose to remain silent, ignore and cover up the problems with misinformation.

> “As a smaller but nevertheless critical part of communication, we’ve been told by several of our members that they don’t understand the voting system we’re using, and it hasn’t been explained.”

The problem is not the voting system. It's that you unjustly disqualify people you don't want to be elected. No matter what voting system is used, the current administration will still not elect people they don't want.

> “What this election exposed was the need for the organization to also assess whether candidates were fully eligible to run and prepared to be seated on the board before voting begins. ... While we have not finished figuring out all of the requirements for that assessment, ...”

It must be really difficult to make a general definition that people who question your own opinion (especially about OSIAD) are not eligible!

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 29, 2025 11:35 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (13 responses)

I'm a little confused by the objection to placing requirements on potential candidates. This not a democracy where the people are free to elect anybody, even if all they do is sit on a beach all year. It is entirely reasonable for a private organisation to require candidates to commit to a certain amount to time/effort/other requirements to be able to hold the position and reject people unable/unwilling to commit to that. None of the requirements [1] seem unreasonable.

As for the voting itself, I've seen much worse but nobody cares because they're organisations noone has heard of. Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by organisational incompetence.

[1] https://opensource.org/board/board-member-agreement

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 29, 2025 11:52 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by organisational incompetence.

Like not explaining the rules properly.

Like moving the goal posts after nominations have closed.

Etc etc. Yes it's incompetence, but it calls the impartiality of the vote into serious question. Changing the rules AFTER the candidates' window for changing things has closed is - to put it bluntly - not a fair vote.

Cheers,
Wol

More than incompetence

Posted Aug 9, 2025 20:06 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

I would even go as far as to suggest that to call what they've done "incompetence" amounts to obscuring a trivial evil. They know that they rigged the results after the election. There's no way this is mere incompetence.

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 29, 2025 12:22 UTC (Tue) by fishface60 (subscriber, #88700) [Link] (10 responses)

The OSI likes to claim to represent Open Source developers and provide a definitive meaning for what Open Source is.

For that to be considered legitimate they need to either only be descriptive about what is already considered to be true by consensus, or they need to democratically engage with the community so that if there is a divisive issue that needs to be settled the losing side can have the consolation that the decision was fair and they were genuinely outvoted, and if the result is close it can be identified that there needs to be some form of compromise.

Yes, they're a private organisation and legally can do whatever they want, but they've been portraying themselves as a custodian of a common-good.

I think it's fine to exclude a candidate if their position is contrary to the purpose of the enterprise (i.e. don't allow a fascist dictator to be democratically elected since their aims are to dismantle the democracy) but if the OSI feels existentially challenged that without accepting a weaker Open Source definition for generative "AI" they'll fade into irrelevance, and that allowing candidates that want to challenge that is an existential risk... then in my opinion they deserve that fate.

If you need to rig an election to preserve your legitimacy you never had it, and given the doubts about the processes I think its their responsibility to prove they haven't.

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 30, 2025 18:56 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (9 responses)

> I think it's fine to exclude a candidate if their position is contrary to the purpose of the enterprise (i.e. don't allow a fascist dictator to be democratically elected since their aims are to dismantle the democracy) but if the OSI feels existentially challenged that without accepting a weaker Open Source definition for generative "AI" they'll fade into irrelevance, and that allowing candidates that want to challenge that is an existential risk... then in my opinion they deserve that fate.

OSAID was not directly at issue in this particular election (i.e. OSI did not specifically disqualify a candidate for being anti-OSAID). The problem, so far as I can understand it, appears to be roughly as follows:

1. OSI initially misstated the number of individual and affiliate positions available, corrected it only after the nomination deadline passed, and then did not give an extension for nominations. This was strategically disadvantageous to some anti-OSAID candidates, but there is no specific evidence that OSI did this intentionally (they called it a mistake).
2. OSI's board members are required to "support publicly all Board decisions, especially those that do not have unanimous consent." Some people don't like that rule, and it's especially problematic for anti-OSAID candidates, but anyone running on a "reform" platform would be affected to some extent.
3. OSI asked all candidates to agree to the above condition (and the rest of the board agreement) in advance, but also said it would only bind the winners of the election.
4. OSI asked candidates to use DocuSign in order to sign the agreement, did not provide a FOSS alternative, and (apparently) was not open to discussion of such alternatives with the candidates (or at least, no such discussion happened as far as I can tell, despite multiple candidates objecting to DocuSign and the agreement).
5. Two candidates, both opposed to OSAID, refused to sign via DocuSign, and instead sent signed PDFs. Both candidates altered the agreement in their PDFs (by striking things out or adding a supplement), with the effect of nullifying the "support publicly" language. OSI ignored these PDFs and disqualified them from the election.

My interpretations and opinions:

1. Incompetence is an entirely plausible explanation for this. They said they improved their process, so it should not happen again. If it does happen again, then that would change my view.
2. I'm not entirely thrilled with the wording here, but I think a policy vaguely resembling this one is probably necessary to some extent in order to allow for open and honest debate between board members. Ideally, it would prohibit board members from directly disparaging one another, prohibit releasing information that the board has not agreed to make public, prohibit direct disparagement of OSI as a whole, and require personal opinions to be clearly distinguished from the board's official position. The requirement to "support" OSI's policy position goes too far IMHO.
3. This is an administrative issue that has been blown wildly out of proportion. If you win the election, and then refuse to sign the agreement, then OSI either needs to rerun the STV calculation, or (depending on timelines and their bylaws, which I have not looked at) possibly rerun the whole election. Releasing multiple STV results might cause confusion, and running multiple elections is an obvious waste of time, so I have no problem with OSI deciding to get the signatures in advance. Yes, it does rule out abstentionism as a reform strategy, but you are not Sinn Féin and this is not the UK parliament. They are not going to leave the board seat empty just because somebody refused to sign the agreement - they will seat another candidate instead, and move right on without your input.
4. I have no idea why they thought this was a good idea. It's a bafflingly terrible decision. Maybe some lawyer told them they "had" to do it this way, but in the worst case, you can always get a physical signature on a piece of paper, so I find that hard to believe.
5. Refusing to use DocuSign is entirely reasonable. Suggesting that you can renegotiate the board agreement before you have even been elected, let alone seated, is a bit much. Altering the board agreement is something that needs to be done as a separate process independent of the election (e.g. a board resolution or the like), because the alternative would be to subject different board members to different versions of the agreement, which seems unworkable to me.

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 30, 2025 21:57 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

In fairness to the OSI, there's no evidence that they would have been unwilling to accept a non-Docusigned signed copy of the original board agreement (although, then again, this was not clear at the outset when the post-vote signing requirement was unexpectedly imposed).

There is no progress, as expected

Posted Apr 30, 2025 22:02 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (4 responses)

> If you win the election, and then refuse to sign the agreement, then OSI either needs to rerun the STV calculation, or (depending on timelines and their bylaws, which I have not looked at) possibly rerun the whole election.

Why, under STV, couldn't the next highest-ranked candidate be promoted as the winner, based on the existing ballot data, assuming the bylaws don't prohibit this?

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 3:16 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

Because that is not how STV works. The premise of STV is that, when someone is eliminated, their votes should be redistributed to the voters' second choices (and third choices if second has been eliminated, etc.). If you eliminate a candidate before running the STV calculation, then all votes for that candidate are redistributed before you even start, and the entire process may play out differently.

If, instead, you run the STV calculation first and then disqualify (one of) the winner(s), everyone who voted for them (or had their vote transferred to them) is fully disenfranchised, which defeats the point of using STV in the first place.

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 3:55 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (2 responses)

This doesn't seem to be consistent with what OpaVote says here, but maybe I'm misunderstanding:
https://blog.opavote.com/2017/04/by-elections-or-filling-...

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 5:42 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Their option 2 has the disenfranchisement problem I described above. Their option 1 is a longer way of saying "rerun the STV calculation," which I anticipated as a solution in my original comment (except they also propose letting everyone who already won keep their seat). Their option 3 is frankly bizarre, and can be summarized as "use the same ballots to run an entirely unrelated calculation that simulates holding a runoff election for that one seat." And yes, that is a third thing you can do, but it's even more problematic because (as they acknowledge) it produces a non-proportional result. In a large assembly, that's probably fine (it's just one seat off from the last proportional election), but it's less acceptable in a board election where there are relatively few seats in total.

As for whether you can or should let the previous winners keep their seats when rerunning the STV calculation - it's complicated, and there's no obvious correct answer. Pros of keeping existing winners:

* It feels irregular if a winning candidate is un-confirmed and replaced with somebody else, as a result of an entirely different candidate withdrawing.
* If a long time passes between the end of the election and the vacancy arising, it is probably infeasible to un-seat people who have already been serving for a while.
* If the a winner does not approve of the other winners, they may strategically withdraw in order to affect the outcome, which should not be allowed. In practice, I suspect that strategic withdrawal should rarely be effective (real voters do not vote for Condorcet cycles or other "weird" outcomes very often, and you need "weird" votes for this to actually happen), and it has the obvious downside that you're no longer a winner, so I'm not sure anyone would ever do this, but it is theoretically possible.
* The math says a *loser* could strategically withdraw in some corner cases (due to violation of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives voting criterion), but only if you rerun the STV calculation after such a withdrawal. Since it is incoherent and nonsensical for a losing candidate to purport to "withdraw" from an election, it should probably be treated as a non-event and ignored. Then this problem is eliminated.

Pros of redoing the whole thing from scratch:

* If you do not rerun the calculation from scratch, voters who favored the withdrawing candidate may have less effect on the outcome, because there's only one open seat when their votes are transferred to the remaining candidates. This is unfair to those voters (relative to the rest of the electorate).
* If the election happened very recently, rerunning STV from scratch should be materially equivalent to scrapping the whole election and starting over, except that nobody has to bother voting again. It is exactly as if the withdrawing candidate was never on the ballot, so it can't be any more unfair than basic STV was to begin with (all voting systems are unfair, some are more unfair than others).

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 8:42 UTC (Thu) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link]

I think option 1 is what Australia did for the upper house back when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Australian_... happened (though that was obviously wasn't before the winners were called).

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 16:53 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

> 3. OSI asked all candidates to agree to the above condition (and the rest of the board agreement) in advance, but also said it would only bind the winners of the election.

That is not accurate. OSI made all potential candidates aware of the existence of the board agreement in an orientation session to which potential candidates were invited. There is no sense in which candidates were asked to agree to anything in the board agreement in advance.

I believe in their retrospective statement and in other comments the OSI has indicated that in future elections they may require candidates to agree to some sort of equivalent to the board agreement in advance of the election.

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 16:57 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (1 responses)

> 5. Two candidates, both opposed to OSAID, refused to sign via DocuSign, and instead sent signed PDFs. Both candidates altered the agreement in their PDFs (by striking things out or adding a supplement), with the effect of nullifying the "support publicly" language. OSI ignored these PDFs and disqualified them from the election.

In my case (I was one of the two candidates), I would not say my supplement had the effect of "nullifying" the support-publicly clause. My supplement said this:

"Board members will endeavor to publicly support Board decisions, especially in cases where
consensus was not reached. However, it is understood that in extraordinary circumstances
involving matters central to OSI’s core mission and the public interest—for example, the
certification or rejection of a license as conforming to the Open Source Definition, or
amendments to the Open Source Definition—a Board member is not only free but encouraged
to publicly express sincere dissent from the Board’s decision, provided that the Board member:
1. Clearly states that they are speaking in their personal capacity.
2. Expresses institutional support for the Board and its decision-making process.
3. Adheres to their fiduciary duties and acts in a manner consistent with the integrity of the
organization.
Additionally, if a Board member was elected based on a platform advocating specific reform
initiatives within OSI, they may communicate publicly about their progress in advancing those
reforms, to the extent such updates are not already evident from public Board minutes.
Furthermore, the expectation to publicly support Board decisions does not apply to:
(a) Decisions made by the Board prior to the signing Board member’s tenure.
(b) Hypothetical future decisions.
Nothing in this agreement shall be interpreted to require silence in cases of whistleblowing or to
compel actions (or inactions) that would contravene a Board director’s fiduciary duties to the
organization."

There is no progress, as expected

Posted May 1, 2025 19:22 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

IMHO that is still a large enough exception that it wasn't reasonable to ask for it under the circumstances.

I do not disagree with asking for such a change to the agreement. I think your proposed wording is superior to the current agreement. But I do not think OSI could have reasonably offered it just to you in particular, without amending the agreement for the board as a whole. And whether or not such an amendment should happen was at issue in the election, so it would also be unreasonable to insist that they make the amendment before the election - deciding whether or not to make such amendments (or other policy reforms) was the implicit purpose of the election, so pre-deciding the issue would undermine the whole point of even having an election in the first place.

OSI's entire history makes this unsurprising

Posted Apr 30, 2025 21:08 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

Given the organization was founded as an astroturfed alternative to FSF and to undermine copyleft, pretty much every maneuver they've done over their entire life showing contempt for the community is unsurprising.

Let them fall into the dustbin of history: they certainly offer little honest value to the community and in fact the past harms are considerable.

A story as old as time.

Posted Aug 9, 2025 20:04 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

1. Identify a respected institution.

2. Kill it.

3. Gut it.

4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

OSI is but the latest of said well-respected (or formerly well-respected) institutions going through the aforementioned transmogrification process.

Sad.