How the election of Individual director works

Eligible candidates are all OSI individual members whose full membership started no later than 2 days before opening the candidacy. Refer to the elections page for this year's timeline.

The eligible candidates who would like to run for an individual member seat will be able to submit a request to the OSI. The staff will check eligibility against our database and will provide further instructions to the candidate.

Eligible and approved candidates will have their personal candidate profile page linked below. Members of OSI can use their login credentials to ask questions to the candidates using the comments on the individual pages of the candidate.

The list of candidates will stay open for four weeks. Fill in the form to submit your candidacy (an OSI account is required).

How voting for Individual Members works

After the candidacy window closes, OSI staff will pull a list of all OSI Individual Members in good standing from our database. That will be the official list of electors. The list will be imported into the voting software and ballots with instructions on how to vote in the preference ballot will be sent via email to all electors.

The voting will be open for 10 days. As soon as the polls are closed, the winners will be announced. 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 exactly one week after.

2022 Individual candidates

Josh Berkus

Josh Berkus has been involved with open source for 25 years, including participating in Linux, PostgreSQL, Perl, OpenOffice, Django, MySQL, CouchDB, Docker, Kubernetes, and multiple other communities. Within OSI, Josh has been a contributing member of License Review since 2003, regularly contributing a developer perspective to reviews of submitted licenses.

Jean-Brunel Webb-Benjamin

Inventor of the world's first post-quantum encrypted messenger, he is always working towards the edge of innovation. With active partnerships with OpenCV and Luxonis he is committed to furthering democratisation and wide-spread adoption of volumetric technologies. His company, Kryotech Ltd, was last year listed as one of the top ten cyber security startups of 2021. Additionally, he is a semi-finalist in the XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Challenge, where he led development of an educational solution that provided novel training via ar/vr and neuroadaptively altering educational content.

Kevin P. Fleming

Kevin P. Fleming has 30+ years of programming experience, with almost every major programming language. Industry experience includes traditional client/server database applications, open source messaging and networking, and mainframe operating systems. Kevin's primary skill is producing solutions that use resources effectively through problem analysis and solution design. Kevin joined Red Hat in January of 2022 to support the creation and delivery of Red Hat’s software products, which are entirely based on open source software.

Myrle Krantz

I am a 44 year-old American immigrant to Germany, where I have lived since my 22nd birthday (exactly). I enjoy playing piano badly, and singing Christmas Carols off-tune and out of season in English and German to my two daughters and our dog. I have served as Treasurer for The Apache Software Foundation where I drove major changes. I modernized The ASF's Accounts Payable systems. I introduced a Conflict of Interest policy. I introduced the policy framework necessary to establish an Endowment. And I introduced the financial tools that empower volunteers such as virtual credit cards.

Rossella Sblendido

Rossella is passionate about open source and has been contributing to several projects over the last decade. She was part of the Core Team of OpenStack Neutron, member of the Technical Steering Committee of OPNFV and of the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation Networking. She works for SUSE, directing an engineering department that develops Uyuni, an open source configuration and infrastructure management tool. She holds a Master degree in Telco Engineering and an MBA.

Amanda Brock

I am a passionate leader in open source software and bring a unique mix of legal, business and practical open source understanding to the Individual Board Member elections.  My main role is as CEO of OpenUK, the organisation for the business of Open Technology in the UK (open source software, open hardware and open data). I'm a lawyer with law degrees from Glasgow, New York and Queen Mary (London) Universities. I spent 25 years working as a Solicitor, working internationally from 2000 and with 20 of those years being inhouse in companies across sectors.

Jim Hall

Jim Hall is a senior IT leader, and a long-time open source software advocate and developer. His first contribution to open source was in 1993, with a patch to GNU Emacs. Since then, Jim has authored, contributed to, or maintained dozens of open source programs and projects. Notable projects include FreeDOS and GNOME.

In addition to writing open source software, Jim also works in usability testing for open source software.

Hilary Richardson

Hilary Richardson has been working on internet law issues for almost ten years, spanning nonprofit legal fellowships at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Wikimedia Foundation, working on platform liability and intellectual property issues at Twitter and Facebook, and working on open source at Google for almost five years.

Tetsuya Kitahata

Tetsuya is open to network communications with all professionals across and over various disciplines as it is his strong belief that we are all citizens of the world and we can all learn/gain from each other in a mutually beneficial manner. Every new person met has the potential to be a true "MASTER MIND"​, we will only discover this by getting out and interacting.

Business development Consultant and Information Technology Consultant. Co-owner of the guesthouse in Southeast Asia. Backpacker. Ex-Sponsor (Bronze / Individual) of the Apache Software Foundation.

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.