How the election of Affiliate director works

Candidates to represent Affiliate organizations are proposed by the Affiliates themselves and they don’t have to be Individual members. A person may only be nominated to run for a single seat in one of the two elections. 

The list of electors for the Affiliate seat is made of the official representative of each affiliate  organization as 2 days before opening the candidacy. Refer to the elections page for this year's timeline..

The representatives of each OSI Affiliate will receive detailed instructions on how to submit candidates. Only one nomination per Affiliate will be accepted.

The list of Affiliate candidates is available below.

How voting for Affiliate works

Only the official representatives of Affiliate organizations may vote in the election of affiliate seats. Only one vote per Affiliate, as submitted by the affiliate representative, will be counted in the election of each affiliate vacancy.

After the candidacy window closes, OSI staff will pull the list of representatives of Affiliates from our database. The list will be double-checked to identify possible duplicates and guarantee that one Affiliate organization has only one vote.

The list will be imported into the voting tool and ballots with instructions on how to vote will be sent via email to all electors.

The poll will stay open for 10 days giving enough time for people to vote. If there are no ties, the new directors will be announced the same day. Otherwise a run-off election will be called immediately to be closed one week after.

All the newly elected directors will be seated at the next board meeting after the elections.

2022 Affiliate candidates

Pamela Chestek

Submitted by pchestek on Fri, 2022-02-25 13:52

Pam is a well-known and well-respected open source lawyer. She has been working in open source since 2008, first working at Red Hat and then in private practice as the principal of Chestek Legal. She was elected to the Board of Directors for the Open Source Initiative in 2019 and since then has served as the Chair of the License Committee.

Carlo Piana

Submitted by acarlberg on Tue, 2022-03-01 18:30

Lawyer and digital freedom advocate, Carlo is an eminent figure in the Open Source field. Former General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation Europe for more than a decade, he represented FSFE and the Samba Team in the largest antitrust litigation in Europe, arguing before the Court of Justice and the European Commission in a ten years long confrontation. This led to the confirmation of the decision against Microsoft and to the opening of a phase of more openness of its protocols and more competition in the browser field.

Matt Jarvis

Submitted by mattjarvis on Sun, 2022-03-06 20:15

Matt is a Board Director of OpenUK and Director of Developer Relations at Snyk. He has spent more than 15 years building products and services around open source software, from embedded devices to large scale distributed systems. Matt is a regular speaker on open source software at conferences across the world, including KubeCon, DockerCon, FOSDEM, Open Infra Summit and All Things Open, a past winner of the OpenStack Outstanding Community Contributor award, and in 2021 was named one of the Top 100 Influencers in Open Technologies in the UK.

George DeMet

Submitted by rachel_norfolk on Sun, 2022-03-06 20:29

George DeMet is an open source community leader and advocate who has served in a variety of volunteer leadership roles in the Drupal community over the last 15 years. As a founding member and longtime chair of the Drupal Community Working Group, he is well-versed in code of conduct enforcement and conflict resolution. Since then, he has worked to develop connections between different open source communities and establish a shared set of best practices for community management and code of conduct enforcement.

Marco A. Gutierrez

Submitted by hpdang on Sun, 2022-03-06 20:44

I am an Open Source Software developer and advocate in Robotics, part of the Open Robotics non profit organization. Among other things we are known for being the stewards of some of the worldwide most popular robotics software such as ROS or the Ignition-Gazebo Simulator. I am also an active FOSSASIA maintainer and mentor supporting the Eventyay project and helping organize Summits and events as well as many workshops to raise awareness and adoption of open source technologies.

Lior Kaplan

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2022-03-07 11:46

I'm Lior, although most people call me by my family name - Kaplan.

I'm a long time Open Source supporter (details below) and happy to be a candidate, and especially on behalf of the Debian GNU/Linux project.

Benito Gonzalez

Submitted by masson on Mon, 2022-03-07 11:51

Benito Gonzalez has been a software developer since 1994. His employment history ranges from government to game studio to higher education. In 2005, Benito joined University of California, Merced, where the new university focused on open source to keep licensing costs down. He started working on Sakai CLE and then uPortal and CAS as a developer, eventually moving on to Manager of Enterprise Web Application Development. In those 10 years, he developed passion and insight for the open source projects within his team.

Gael Blondelle

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2022-03-07 15:03

I am VP Ecosystem Development of the Eclipse Foundation, where I work on engaging with more individuals and companies to adopt proper open source governance and promote their open source project. 

I have been working in Open Source for the last 18 years in various roles: as an entrepreneur, as a business developer and as a community builder. 

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.