Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results
- Inicie sesión ou rexístrese para enviar comentarios
You may want to sign that petition (one way is to send your signature by email): https://codeberg.org/OSI-Concerns/election-results-2025
For an independent summary of the events, you can watch https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=fwfKVzsEsLU
I just did my first Codeberg pull request for this petition. Seemed like a pretty simple process, I hope I did it correctly.
Yes, please do sign it.
Thank you for that detailed written account. It all sounds like a highly convoluted process for an election indeed.
NB: the last thing I wish to be is overcritical, but a redundant "the" has been spotted in "The OSI's explanation that they needed to know who the 'actual candidates were before we ran the STV calculation to determine the the outcome of the vote' also warrants scrutiny."
Appreciate the catch - fixed.
Excellent summary. I would like to let clear what you only want to imply with:
If, as some suspect, Bradley Kuhn and Richard Fontana received a significant number of votes, potentially enough to win, then the OSI's actions take on a far more sinister appearance.
If neither Bradley Kuhn nor Richard Fontana had won, the current OSI board, approved in its decisions, would have been more than happy to immediately publish the vote tallies, as usual. I do not think one needs to be particularly suspicious to believe that...
Brodie Robertson put up a video on this topic: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=fwfKVzsEsLU
It is the link I gave in the original post. ;-)
Oh yes I see you did - I didn't realize it was Brodie, I would have watched it sooner. He's telling people at the end of the video to go sign the petition.
I am a member!
Reading this thread and the post on jxself's website made me curious about "the OSI's silence" and their side of the story, so I had a look at the OSI website.
I did not care to read everything in detail, but after a quick, careless skim, the relevant information seems to be here (dates are those stated on the website):
- 2025-01-22 blog post by Nick Vidal including
- an undated apologetic update (as mentioned in jxself's post)
- this "election timeline"
- this (non-blog) explanation "last modified on March 21, 2025", including the same timeline
- 2025-03-21 blog post by "OSI" including
- this image
- and this one
- and this 2025-04-21 update – that would be the day after jxself's post.
My impressions:
- From the non-blog explainer, it seems "elections", "election polls" and "appointments" are three different things?
- "The results of elections for both Individual and Affiliate member board seats are advisory with the OSI Board making the formal appointments to open seats based on the community’s votes."
- (in bold at bottom of explainer) "The community election polls provide valuable input and they have always been advisory in nature"
That's not what it sounded like in the 2025-01-22 blog post, with sentences like
- "The OSI board of directors is renewing three of its seats with an open election process among its full individual members and affiliates."
- "Individual members will elect one director"
- The timeline lacks anything in the way of "Publish full poll tally".
- Already above the part marked "update", the 2025-03-21 blog post stated clearly that "Three candidates have been excluded from the final tally: Two were ineligible as they did not sign the current board agreement; one returned the signed agreement after the deadline passed."
- Nowhere does it say whether the actual appointment reflects or doesn't reflect the poll results, that is, whether and how the polls had any relevance at all.
- The data in the text and images under the perhaps misleading subheading "Complete [sic] elections results" quietly omits those candidates that have been filtered away – quietly except for the conspicuous wording "valid candidates" and the difference between the number of "ballots" and "valid ballots".
- Below the horizontal ruler, in the part marked "update": "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."
- Even though the post concludes that OSI "must improve all communications" and pledges that "OSI will improve transparency by […] enhancing public communication", my impression so far is that OSI does not so much as acknowledge that members are demanding that OSI publish full poll results, much less include them in the update of one week ago, nor in any subsequent update or blog post as of today, 2025-04-28, one week after the update.
I haven't checked other channels such as social media, but on the three pages mentioned above, I don't find any attempt to address and dispel the criticism regarding the full vote tally. I hope I've overlooked something.