[License-discuss] How can we as a community help empower authors outside license agreements?

[Brian Behlendorf]

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