[OpenID board] Membership (or lack thereof) and Board Elections
David Recordon
drecordon at sixapart.com
Fri Feb 29 06:39:23 UTC 2008
Stemming from other conversations...I'd have to agree that so far
we've really done very little to push for membership in the OpenID
Foundation. Today the benefits are around electing the Foundation's
board and approving specification working groups, though they're not
articulated anywhere nor have we actually built the applications to
make these benefits a reality!
I also think that the local chapters of the OpenID Foundation will (or
at least should) weigh somehow on community board elections. The
community board should be balanced to represent OpenID communities
around the World and finding a way to have local chapters help achieve
this feels imperative.
I want to start out by saying that I completely agree that we need to
hold elections for the community board seats so that they are
officially elected by the community! That said, I am truly worried
that the OpenID Foundation's membership is not actually in a position
to do that yet. Rather, it seems that as we still are not focusing on
building the membership base, even if we hold elections in April/May
(Mike's policy document was awesome btw) *the outcome still won't
represent the community*. In fact, we might be in a worse position
where 20 members elect the board members for one or two years which is
then seen as being representative of the community. While it can be
argued that even 20 members electing the community board is better
than 0 members electing it, I'd much rather see us in a situation
where even if it is another six months down the road we have 500
members electing the board!
Right now, the OpenID ecosystem is moving and growing faster than the
Foundation or its board! I would strongly advocate that we focus our
energy today on making the Foundation match the growing community (as
we did yesterday in Japan) before locking down the board for another
two years; nearly the entire lifespan of OpenID itself.
My $0.02,
--David
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