OpenSSL Communities
Wed 12 Feb 2025 7:34PM

🔹 Nominate Your Distribution Voting Representative

AA Anton Arapov Public Seen by 21

Dear Distributions Community Members,

This is a critical step in ensuring your distribution has a voice in OpenSSL’s Projects governance. Each distribution in the Distributions Community is entitled to one vote, and only the designated voting representative will be able to cast that vote. If your distribution does not nominate a representative, you will not be able to participate in the upcoming Technical Advisory Committee elections.

What You Need to Do Now:

  1. Choose a representative from your distribution.

  2. Submit their details (name and distribution name):

We will confirm receipt of your nomination within 3 business days. If you do not receive confirmation, please follow up to ensure your representative is properly registered.

JR

Jaroslav Reznik Thu 13 Feb 2025 11:37AM

Hi Anton,

Could you be more specific in how you define a distribution? I believe this need a little bit of clarification, especially in case like Fedora, RHEL and CentOS, where each one is distribution on its own with own communities and governance, but for example OpenSSL maintainer may overlap.

AA

Anton Arapov Mon 17 Feb 2025 8:14AM

@Jaroslav Reznik The description of the Distributions group includes the definition: "The “Distributions” group includes maintainers of operating systems or significant packages that integrate OpenSSL Foundation and OpenSSL Corporation projects."

The challenge is ensuring the ballot remains representative while allowing individuals to be part of multiple communities and multiple entities, such as distributions, within a community.

If a person represents multiple distributions within a single community, they still get only one vote. It ensures they have only one vote across all the distributions they represent, preventing any manipulation of the ballot.

When nominated, they can list all their distribution affiliations for visibility, but they can only appear on the ballot once. This prevents their votes from being split across distributions, which could reduce their chances of being elected.

It also makes sense for such individuals to encourage others from their distributions to get involved and gain voting rights. Those supporters are likely to back their representative, increasing their chances of winning a seat on the advisory committee.

GT

Gordon Tetlow Fri 21 Feb 2025 3:11AM

FreeBSD - Gordon Tetlow (me)