Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2025/03/19/a-sign-board-agreement.html

Update 2025-03-21: During the 2025 Open Source Initiative
I used my blog as a campaigning tool (for
reasons discussed below) before I
knew how much interest there would ultimately be in the
FOSS community
about the 2025 OSI Board of Directors election. Since this was used as a
source for the LWN article, keeping the original record easy to find is
obviously important and folks shouldn’t have to go to archive.org/web to
find it. Nevertheless, if you’re just digging into this story fresh, I
don’t really recommend reading the below. Instead, I suggest just
reading Brockmeier’s
LWN article because he’s a journalist and writes better and more
concise than me, and he’s unbiased and the below is my (understandably) biased view as a
candidate who lived through this problematic election.

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 MON 2025-03-17 at 10:00 US/Pacific. One hour later,
candidates were surprised to receive an email from OSI demanding
that all candidates sign a Board agreement before results were
posted. This was surprising because during mandatory orientation,
candidates were told the opposite: that a Board agreement need not be
signed until the Board formally appointed you as a Director (as the
elections are only advisory &mdash: OSI’s Board need not follow election
results in any event. It was also surprising because the deadline was a
mere 47 hours later (WED 2025-03-19 at 10:00 US/Pacific).

Many of us candidates attempted to get clarification over the last 46
hours, but OSI has
not
communicated clear answers in response to those requests. Based on
these unclear responses, the best we can surmise is that OSI intends to
modify the ballots cast by Affiliates and Members to remove any candidate
who misses this new deadline. We are loathe to assume the worst, but
there’s little choice given the confusing responses and surprising change
in requirements and deadlines.

So, I decided to sign a Board Agreement with
OSI. Here
is the PDF that I just submitted to the OSI. I emailed it to OSI
instead. OSI did recommend DocuSign, but
I refuse
to use proprietary software for my FOSS volunteer work on moral and
ethical grounds⁰ (see my two keynotes
(FOSDEM
2019, FOSDEM
2020) (co-presented with Karen Sandler) on this subject for more info
on that).

My running mate on the Shared Platform for OSI Reform, Richard Fontana, also signed a Board Agreement
with OSI before the deadline as well.

---

⁰
Chad Whitacre
has made
unfair criticism of my refusal tog use Docusign as part of the
(apparently ongoing?) 2025 OSI Board election political campaign. I respond to
his comment here in this footnote (& further discussion is welcome
using the fediverse, AGPLv3-powered comment feature of my blog). I’ve put it in this
footnote because Chad is not actually raising an issue about this
blog post’s primary content, but instead attempting
to reopen
the debate about Item 4 in the Shared Platform for OSI Reform.
My response follows:

In addition to
the two keynotes
mentioned above, I propose these analogies that really are apt to
this situation:

• Imagine if the Board of The Nature Conservancy told Directors they
  would be required, if elected, to use a car service to attend Board
  meetings. It’s easier, they argue, if everyone uses the same service and
  that way, we know you’re on your way, and we pay a group rate anyway. Some
  candidates for open Board seats retort that’s not environmentally sound,
  and insist — not even that other Board members must stop using the
  car service &mdash: but just that Directors who chose should be allowed to
  simply take public transit to the Board meeting — even though it
  might make them about five minutes late to the meeting. Are these Director
  candidates engaged in “passive-aggressive politicking”?
• Imagine if the Board of Friends of Trees made a decision that all
  paperwork for the organization be printed on non-recycled paper made from
  freshly cut tree wood pulp. That paper is easier to move around, they say
  — and it’s easier to read what’s printed because of its quality.
  Some candidates for open Board seats run on a platform that says Board
  members should be allowed to get their print-outs on 100% post-consumer
  recycled paper for Board meetings. These candidates don’t insist that
  other Board members use the same paper, so, if these new Directors are
  seated, this will create extra work for staff because now they have to do
  two sets of print-outs to prep for Board meetings, and refill the machine
  with different paper in-between. Are these new Director candidates, when
  they speak up about why this position is important to them as a moral
  issue, a “a distracting waste of time”?
• Imagine if the Board of the APSCA made the decision that Directors must
  work through lunch, and the majority of the Directors vote that they’ll get
  delivery from a restaurant that serves no vegan food whatsoever. Is it
  reasonable for this to be a non-negotiable requirement — such that
  the other Directors must work through lunch and just stay hungry? Or
  should they add a second restaurant option for the minority? After all,
  the ASPCA condemns animal cruelty but doesn’t go so far as to
  demand that everyone also be a vegan. Would the meat-eating directors then
  say something like “opposing cruelty to animals could be so much more
  than merely being vegan” to these other Directors?