Remember the classic headline from the 1970s: “Ford to city — drop dead”? Well, this is how it looks, transcribed to itty-bitty open source in the 21st century. It’s a different scale, but…
It looks like Faraone will have to wait until next time there’s an election.
We told you yesterday that Faraone, a Debian dev who’s preferred pronouns are “them” and “they,” had tried to nominate themself to take a stab at one of the two individual seats that are up for grabs in a board election that’s currently underway at Open Source Initiative, the organization that’s pretty much the keeper of the open source keys.
The trouble was: when Faraone filed to get on the ballot — at about 9 pm local time in San Francisco where they live, on February 17, the last day to file — his filing was rejected because it was past closing time for filing, which was at 11:59 pm UTC — which would’ve been something like 3:00 pm in San Francisco.
Farone thought this was a little unfair. OSI is registered in California — same state as Farone lives — so figuring filing deadline was PST seemed to be a no-brainer, since nowhere on OSI’s website did it mention UTC in connection with the filing deadline. It just said that February 17 would be the last day.
I did learn this morning, Eastern Standard Time, from a very nice but anonymous OSI member who emailed me with a screenshot, that evidently an email that OSI sent to all OSI members does put the time as UTC… which only got a shrug from me. I’m a dues paying OSI member and I didn’t get that email, nor did it show up in my spam folder. Even if it did and it just got misdirected as junk, or I just didn’t open it, or I deleted it by mistake… none of that would matter, but would just go to illustrate why all such information about something as important as a board election should be displayed on a website where users can reliably find it.
OSI Thumbs Its Nose
This afternoon, again Eastern Standard Time, I got a DM on LinkedIn from Tracy Hinds, who’s the board chair at OSI. I’d reached out to her yesterday soon after I learned of Faraone’s plight with a list of “what’s-up-with-that” questions. She pretty much said that no matter what time zone you’re in, it’s no go for Farone time as far as OSI is concerned.
“Everyone who is qualified to run for elections (full members of OSI) received multiple emails with the time zone, sent with read receipts,” she said. “The public-facing web page did not have the time zone, and we’ve now updated it for clarity going forward. Extending the deadline would be unfair to the other candidates, and it will be clear on Friday when the slate is released that differing points of view will be well represented.
“We appreciate the opportunity to improve our processes, and we’re looking forward to the next steps in the election for our community.”
“Well, dang!” said I. That’s not very nice, nor very community spirited, nor is it taking responsibility for one’s mistakes. Oh, and about that “reason why not”: How in heck would putting Faraone’s name on the ballot be unfair by any stretch of the imagination to the other candidates — unless you want to go all law and order and say something like, “Well, because they played by the rules.”
Well, so did Faraone as far as could be told from the OSI website.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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