Background

The OpenSSL board has requested that the BAC come up with a mechanism for functioning effectively. To establish our position on this, part of the BAC met on Monday, August 17, 2026. Since the board expects the committee to be proactive and figure things out, the group got together while the latest board discussion was still fresh. The goal was to skip waiting for the next monthly meeting and start putting together some actionable ideas to take back to the board.

Issues Raised

• Unclear Mandate: The committee is operating without a real job description or clear parameters. The board expects proactive problem-solving but hasn't provided the strategic direction needed to make that happen.

• One-Way Street: Right now, the committee is basically functioning as a glorified issue tracker. We collect community requests and send them up the chain, but the board rarely communicates its own initiatives down to us or provides outcomes on the requests we submit.

• Struggling to Scale the Board: The committee believes its primary purpose is to help scale the board's reach, since the board doesn't have the time or resources to engage with every community directly. However, without two-way communication and insight into board decisions, the committee can't step up and act as an empowered proxy.

• Owning Our Part: Committee members recognize we have our own operational shortcomings. We haven't always added real business value beyond acting as a relay mechanism. We need to do a better job of filtering out unfeasible requests and turning raw community feedback into proactive, strategic advice for the board.

• Losing Community Trust: When we ask the community for input but can never tell them the outcome, it damages our credibility. Without a closed feedback loop, people will just stop showing up and participating.

• Wasted Time and Burnout: Committee members have dedicated time from their employers to do this work, but without a clear mandate or two-way communication, that time is being wasted. It's leading to frustration and burnout.

• Lack of Board Transparency: We have zero visibility into what the board is actively working on. If we knew their priorities, we could actually go out and gather relevant community feedback ahead of time.

Proposed Solutions

• Make Communication Two-Way: We need a real conversation, not just a reporting structure. The board should actively ask the committee to gather input on specific topics, and they need to consistently explain the "why" when community requests are denied.

• Empower the Committee as Proxies: Instead of relying on board members to drop into community meetings to answer questions and keep people engaged, the board needs to equip the committee with policy decisions and updates upfront. This lets the committee handle community concerns directly, which actually solves the board's scaling problem.

• Define a Workable Mandate: We need to formalize the committee's role so it functions as a true advocacy group that generates new business value, rather than just acting as a messenger service.

• Use Transparent Tracking Tools: Push forward with the public request form on Lumio for non-commercial users. This gives people a transparent way to submit, discuss, and track requests outside of developer-heavy platforms like GitHub.

Action Items

• Write up the core issues from this discussion into a clear, easily digestible set of bullet points. (This is done—you are reading it in this post.)

• Start a position paper on Lumio outlining these communication gaps, our own internal shortcomings, and a framework for a new mandate that actually helps scale the board. (This has already been started on Lumio in this post.)

• Share the draft and meeting notes with the rest of the absent committee members to make sure everyone is on the exact same page.

• Set up a dedicated meeting with the board to walk through the finalized paper and formally request a restructured, two-way way of working.