OpenSSL Communities
Tue 26 Aug 2025 4:08PM

BAC elections are approaching. What can be improved?

NT Nicola Tuveri Public Seen by 13

The nominal one year term of the BAC representatives is almost up: there might be extensions or delays, but sooner rather than later a new election round will be upon us!

I'd like to start a discussion in this group to elicit wider input from all our communities about it.

  • what can we do to improve the election process?

  • what can we do to get more voters?

  • what can we do to get more candidates?

  • is there a need to revise the current set of communities? (add more, remove some)

  • currently the BAC term duration is set to 1 year. Do members of our communities believe this should be changed? (this point may have different answers between Foundation and Corporation committees)

  • any other concern?

DB

Dmitry Belyavsky Tue 26 Aug 2025 5:33PM

I think we should get one more community - application maintainers heavily dependent on OpenSSL. However, I don't understand the criteria to include people there.

TM

Tomas Mraz Tue 26 Aug 2025 9:06PM

@Dmitry Belyavsky My concern is that that community basically contains people that are already part of one of the other communities as any application developer/maintainer can fit into any of the individual/small business/large business/academia. In that sense also the distributions community is sort of redundant. However I am not sure whether that kind of redundancy actually is problematic or not.

RL

Richard Levitte Wed 27 Aug 2025 10:06AM

@Tomas Mraz One could ask the same thing about the committers community

In essence, our community criteria seem to be a mix of position and role, a little depending on from community to community... and yeah, then we have overlaps.

TM

Tomas Mraz Wed 27 Aug 2025 11:58AM

Perhaps then we should have two sets of communities - one set based on where the person is employed - i.e, individual, large, small, academia+non-profits and then a second set based on what does the person do with openssl most - distributions, committers, application developers, library developers, business managers, doc writers, users - not sure if it is exhaustive enough list

TM

Tomas Mraz Wed 27 Aug 2025 11:58AM

But maybe it is an overkill...

RL

Richard Levitte Wed 27 Aug 2025 5:31PM

@Tomas Mraz Perhaps a little bit?

MB

Michael Baentsch Sat 30 Aug 2025 8:19AM

There is one thing that irked me in the previous election round (didn't happen in BACs but TACs): One and the same person elected to represent different communities in Foundation and Corporation. Maybe that's due to too few candidates (?) but I'd still suggest prohibiting that going forward: One person should focus on one community. One person representing the same community in Foundation and Corporation in turn seems sensible (also avoiding duplicate discussions) but possibly too much work for that person if done diligently (?)

A consequent, second improvement suggestion (or plea to get a suitable pointer explaining it if already existing): Before the next election round document clearly the differences between responsibilities/tasks of representatives of the different communities for Foundation vs Corporation. As an example: I consider myself to be (a fiercely independent :) Individual but couldn't decide whether to stand for election in Foundation or Corporation to represent that community (and in the end thus did neither, possibly contributing to a dearth of candidates): Being one, I'd like to see a good representation for the truly "old style" idealistic individuals working to foster the common good by way of voluntary contributions to OpenSource (speaks for Foundation TAC) but also those individuals making a living by doing so, aka consultants -- (speaks for Corporate TAC -- if that is the distinction (?)). Both types of people can and do use and improve OpenSSL and should have a dedicated voice representing them. Arguably the same holds true for the other communities (?).