On Wed, 18 Mar 2020, Tobie Langel wrote:
Yeah, I wasn't clear enough, sorry. I believe the OSI should seek to be
broadly representative of the overall open source community and the
broader population which is affected by open source. With a voting
membership that is in the hundreds, I don't think it makes any sense to
have elections when your broader community is in the millions for open
source practitioners and the billions for impacted people. Hence I
believe the existing OSI board should proactively seek additional board
members that are representative of these different constituencies to
join the board (and/or the affiliate program when such constituencies
are also represented by organizations) and operate using a
consensus-driven decision-making process (rather than voting) and a set
of guidelines (like W3C's priority of constituencies, for example).
No one can argue against making sure everyone in the "overall open source
community" (which arguable is any user of any digital device at this
point) feels included and invited by OSI.
But as a screenwriter once said through a fictional president, "history is
made by those who show up." The self-selected nature of both the electors
(you have to be a member, for which the bar is low) and OSI candidates
(you submit an application, and you're on the ballot, no canvassing
required) is key to the legitimacy of the work products that emerge.
Any other approach - where someone is either appointed or even
self-appoints themselves as a representative of others - leads to agency
issues and roadblocks to consensus. Someone who says "I represent myself,
I believe X, but convince me otherwise" has a much greater chance of
reaching outside their comfort zone to agree to a consensus view than
someone who says "I represent others, and they won't accept Y".
Advocacy for more involvement in OSI and open source projects from
under-represented regions and demographies would be the best way to tackle
the sense of disconnect.
Brian
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