FLOSS Foundations Board and Membership Selections
Version 5.1 by Patrick Masson on 2015/01/11 22:06
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Type of selection/specific examples | Details about selectors | Terms (or other details) | Frequency of election? | Link to more details | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
General membership election | |||||
GNOME Foundation | Comprised of Foundation members; members must be contributors to the project; protections against any one company employing more than a certain %age of board members | One year term | Annual | http://www.gnome.org/foundation/governance/ | |
Humanitarian Open Street Map | "voting members"- individuals who are contributors to the project; members are nominated by an existing member and confirmed by existing membership | One year term | Annual | http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Board_Elections | |
Open Source Geospatial Foundation | "charter members"- individuals who are contributors to the project; members are nominated by an existing member and confirmed by existing membership | ? | ? | http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/incorporation/bylaws.html | |
Open Street Map Foundation | voting members are anyone who pays the yearly membership fee | ? | ? | http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM14/Election_to_Board | |
Software in the Public Interest (affiliated with Debian) | "contributing members" (may be individuals or organizations) approved by a membership committee; organizational members have 1 vote each, like individual members | Three year term | Annual; 1/3rd of seats up for election each year | http://spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws/ | |
Apache Software Foundation | Members vote for board; members are all individuals approved by the existing membership on basis of their contribution. | ? | ? | ||
CACert | Members vote at annual general meeting (held on IRC) | 7 members; 3 must be Australian | Annual | https://wiki.cacert.org/AGM/Next | |
Python Software Foundation | Members vote | https://www.python.org/psf/bylaws/ | |||
Gentoo Foundation | Members vote; membership obtained "on request" but membership lapses if no votes are cast in two consecutive board elections | ||||
The Document Foundation (affiliated with the LibreOffice project) | Elected by foundation membership, which is open free of charge to all our contributors, upon review of their contribution | Two year term | https://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/statutes/ | ||
KDE e.V. | All active members of KDE e.V. get to vote in board elections at annual general meeting | Three year term | Annual | ||
Self-selecting board | |||||
Creative Commons | Community and affiliates may nominate members but do not directly select them | ? | ? | http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/38704 | |
Mifos Initiative | Seeded from community leaders and with people invited for their core skills and alignment after initial seeding. | As needed | |||
Benetech | Self-perpetuating board; Founder has right to appoint one member (currently also the Founder) | http://benetech.org/about-us/who-we-are/ | |||
Mozilla Foundation | Elected by existing board | Annual | https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pdf | ||
Software Freedom Conservancy | Elected by existing board | https://sfconservancy.org/about/board/ | |||
External authority | e.g., appointed by a single corporation, or by the project/Foundationfounder | ||||
Metabrainz Foundation (affiliated with Musicbrainz project) | President chooses | No term limits | As needed |
| |
Free Software Foundation | Founder chooses | ||||
Election by sub-groups | |||||
(none purely with this model; see hybrids below) | |||||
Donor election | e.g., most 501(c)6s | ||||
(none purely with this model, see hybrids below) | |||||
Hybrid model | e.g., two or more of the above | ||||
Eclipse Foundation | (Complex system, necessarily simplified) large donors meeting certain criteria can directly appoint board members; classes of smaller donors can vote amongst themselves to appoint some board members; developer and sustaining community members can elect some members in annual election | Depends | Annual for "commiter" (i.e., developer community) members, and "Sustaining" (i.e. typically smaller company) members | https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/Eclipse%20BYLAWS%202011_08_15%20Final.pdf | |
OpenStack Foundation | 2 classes of corporate foundation membership - Platinum and Gold. Platinum members, of which there are 8, each appoint one board representative. Gold members, of which there can be a max of 24 select 8 representatives from amongst themselves. Individual foundation membership is open to anyone with interest, and that membership class also elects 8 representatives. | Individual and Gold member representatives all sit for a one year term. | http://www.openstack.org/election/2015-individual-director-election/ | ||
Open Source Initiative | Members can be individuals or other organizations; each member class separately nominates board representatives. (For legacy reasons, existing board must approve those nominations, but trying to move towards a model where these are actual elections rather than voting on a nomination.) | http://opensource.org/elections | |||
Wikimedia Foundation | one founder's seat (reserved for Jimmy Wales); two seats selected by the Wikimedia chapters; three seats elected directly by the Wikimedia community; four seats appointed by the rest of the Board for specific expertise | http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees |
Others not yet in the table:
- Linux Foundation