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

[Brendan Hickey]

Last year I ran for the OSI board on a platform of changing OSI board
elections (and defending open source against predatory licensing.) One
board member called it "probably the funniest platform I've seen." Here I
am feeling like Cassandra of Troy!

At-large approval voting allows a winning bloc to control all seats. I do
not believe that's the case here. My mental model of board voting is that
thoughtful people vote for other dedicated, thoughtful people who are
interested in a thankless, unpaid position. I cast my own votes based on my
personal experiences with candidates. For truly adversarial voting there's
an escape hatch: the board is empowered to set aside election results if I
pay my 300 closest friends to join the OSI.

While these concerns are largely theoretical, there are more pluralistic
voting systems out there.

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 9:32 AM Tobie Langel <tobie at unlockopen.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 23:48 Gil Yehuda via License-discuss <
> license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>
>> Moreover, the system is set up so that voters neglect to vote for people
>> they don't want to see seated.
>>
>
> That would be true of other forms of voting, such as single transferable
> vote (STV), but isn’t true of stack ranking (which is what the OSI uses).
> In stack ranking, voting for other candidates than the ones you want to
> champion actually diminishes your favorite candidate’s chance of getting
> elected. You’re thus incentivized not to vote for more candidates than
> there are seats.
>
> But seeing it that way suggests that 256 of the 338 voters (about 75%) did
>> not want an outcome with Coraline getting a seat and 302 voters (about 90%)
>> did not want an outcome where Tobie got a seat.
>>
>
> As explained above, you can’t make this claim from the results of an
> election which uses stack ranking. What you can say is 256 voters out of
> 338 favored two other candidates over Coraline. Maybe all of them would
> have voted for Coraline had there been a third seat open. Maybe none would.
> You simply can’t tell from the results.
>
> —tobie
>
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