Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2025/03/17/sign-board-agreement-to-be-considered.html
An Update Regarding the 2025 Open Source Initiative Elections
I’ve
explained in
other posts that I ran for the 2025 Open Source Initative Board of
Directors in the “Affiliate” district.
Voting closed on Monday
2025-03-17 at 10:00 US/Pacific.
One hour after that, I and at least three other candidates received the
following email:
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 11:01:22 -0700
From: OSI Elections team <[email protected]>
To: Bradley Kuhn <[email protected]>
Subject: TIME SENSITIVE: sign OSI board agreement
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Thanks for participating in the OSI community polls which are now
closed. Your name was proposed by community members as a candidate for the
OSI board of directors. Functioning of the board of directors is critically
dependent on all the directors committing to collaborative
practices.
For your name to be considered by the board as we compute and review the
outcomes of the polls,you must sign the board agreement
before Wednesday March 19, 2025 at 1700 UTC
(check times in your
timezone).
You’ll receive another email with the link to the agreement.
TIME SENSITIVE AND IMPORTANT: this is a hard deadline.
Please return the signed agreement asap, don’t wait.
Thanks
OSI Elections team
(The link email did arrived too, with a link to a proprietary service called
DocuSign. Fontana downloaded the PDF out of
DocuSign and
it appears to match the document found here. This document includes a
clause that Fontana and I explicitly indicated in
our OSI
Reform Platform should be rewritten. )
All the (non-incumbent) candidates are surprised by this. OSI told us
during the mandatory orientation meetings (on WED 2025-02-19 & again on
TUE 2025-02-25) that the Board Agreement needed to be signed only by the
election winners who were seated as Directors. No one mentioned (before or
after the election) that all candidates, regardless of whether they won or
lost, needed to sign the agreement. I’ve also served o many other 501(c)(3)
Boards, and I’ve never before been asked to sign anything official for
service until I was formally offered the seat.
Can someone more familiar with the OSI election process explain this? Specifically, why
are all candidates (even those who lose) required to sign the Board Agreement before
election results are published? Can folks who ran before confirm for us that this seems to vary
from procedures in past years?
Please reply on the fediverse thread if you have
information. Richard Fontana also reached out to OSI on their
discussion board on the same matter.