Delegates: Roles, Responsibilities & Participation

Hi everyone,

This post lays out what it means to be a community delegate: what the role involves, how delegation works in each community, how to change your organization's delegate, and the participation standard we ask delegates to hold. Please give it a read.

What a delegate is

Every organization that takes part in an OpenSSL community (a company, a distribution, or an institution) is represented by a single delegate. The delegate is your organization's voice and vote. They cast your organization's position in community polls, follow the discussions behind those decisions, and carry information both ways between your organization and the community.

You can always see who currently represents each organization: delegates are marked with a delegate label next to their name in the community members roster.

This is real, ongoing, often unpaid work, and it is the foundation the communities run on. Thank you to everyone who takes it on.

A delegate's responsibilities:

• Vote in the community's polls. This is the single most important duty.

• Stay informed on the proposals and threads under discussion.

• Represent your organization's position faithfully, and relay community decisions back to it.

• Engage constructively, surfacing your organization's needs and concerns.

The communities

Delegation applies to the four communities of organizations:

• Academics: universities and research groups working with and on OpenSSL.

• Distributions: projects and products that bundle OpenSSL and distribute it to the public. This is not limited to operating systems. It covers any software that ships OpenSSL publicly, including applications, appliances, and libraries.

• Large Businesses: organizations with more than 100 employees that build on or depend on OpenSSL.

• Small Businesses: organizations with 100 or fewer employees in the OpenSSL ecosystem.

Each community elects representatives onto the Business Advisory Committee (BAC) and Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), which carry the community's input into OpenSSL's governance.

Changing your organization's delegate

If your organization needs to change who represents it (a new hire, a role change, someone moving on), reach out to your community's BAC members. They coordinate delegate changes and will get the new delegate set up.

If the BAC representatives are unavailable, the TAC representatives are the failover. Contact them and they will help or route your request.

Participation standard: at least 25% in a rolling year

A delegate seat is a commitment to show up. To hold delegate status, a delegate must vote in at least 25% of their community's eligible polls over a rolling 12-month period.

• Eligible means polls opened on or after you became your organization's delegate. Polls that closed before you took the seat are never counted against you, and re-run polls are excluded.

• We measure participation periodically and share the results openly.

• If a delegate falls below 25% across the year, the seat is reviewed. We will reach out, and if the organization wants to stay represented, we will work with the BAC (TAC as failover) to confirm or replace the delegate. The goal is representation that is genuinely active, not to penalize anyone.

25% is a low bar. Most communities run only a handful of polls a year, so it usually means voting on just the few decisions that matter most to your organization.

Questions?

Reply here, or contact your community's BAC representatives (TAC as failover). Thank you for keeping your organizations represented and the communities healthy.