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OpenChain Specification Chair – Election Results

The OpenChain Project ran an election for co-chairs of the Specification Work Group. The election period was from 2022-11-16 until 2022-11-22 Close of Business UTC.

The Nominees

The Results

Helio received the majority of votes for the licensing co-chair.
Chris received the majority of votes for the security co-chair.

Conclusion: Helio and Chris will be passed as recommendations to the OpenChain Governing Board, who are meeting on the 8th of December. After this the new Specification Chair(s) will be announced.

Congratulations to everyone who was nominated. Each candidate is a valued member of our community and has played a significant role in our success. We look forward to continuing to work together closely as the project evolves. The results of this vote should not be viewed as a popularity contest, but rather a snapshot of community perspectives at this moment in time. As always, we rely on ALL of you to be the foundation and the driver of our specification work.

Thanks to everyone who voted. Your time was deeply appreciated. We will be holding our next election in one year, and we look forward to your participation at that time as well.

Details of the Election:

We received 13 votes in total.

Licensing

  • Helio Chissini de Castro received 7 Votes
  • Steve Kilbane received 6 Votes

Security

  • Chris Wood received 10 Votes
  • Jacob Wilson received 3 Votes

More Details About How The Election Worked

How we are running this election is split into two lengthy descriptions below. We are striving to do two things:

  1. Create an open election process
  2. Address the potential we have to have multiple domain experts sharing work

Because this is our first major election for Specification Chair, the process may have some rough edges. If there are any critical issues, we will address them.

How We Ran The Elections

The OpenChain Governing Board is formally considering who should be appointed by the board for the position(s) of OpenChain Specification Chairperson, and invites the broader OpenChain community to provide their perspective.

In this process, the broader OpenChain community will have nominees proposed and voted on to provide a recommendation. That recommendation will be passed to the OpenChain Governing Board for review, approval and ratification at their next meeting.

The specific process on behalf of the community is to undertake a voting process after a period of nomination. The community will vote in the following manner:

Votes for chairpeople will be sent by email to operations@openchainproject.org(received by the OpenChain General Manager and Project Manager).

Each member of our specification@ can cast *one* vote. All members of main@ are entitled to join specification@. The requirement to join the specification list is to maintain that list as the “single source of truth” for our specification-editing and other core specification work.

The votes will be tallied by the General Manager and prepared for the OpenChain Governing Board to review.

The tally will be reported to the OpenChain governing board. Their feedback and final decision will be provided to the community-at-large after their next formal governing board meeting.

For the 2022 OpenChain Specification Work Group elections the following notes are provided:
(1) we are operationally splitting the specification work group into two work groups: licensing and security, reflecting our two specifications in-market.
(2) for *this* specific election, we will split the election into two threads: one license biased (two nominees) and one security biased (two nominees). The result will be two chairs to fill the co-chair positions after approval by the OpenChain Governing Board.
(3) this means everyone on specification@ should vote for:
(i) their preferred choice for license work group chair;
(I) their preferred choice for security work group chair.
(4) these votes may be cast between the 16th and 22nd of November 2022.
(5) the OpenChain Governing Board will receive the tally of votes expressing community feedback, and will review it formally at their next meeting on the 8th of December 2022.
(6) it is expected that at this juncture the community will receive a response from the OpenChain Governing Board regarding their decision(s) around specification chairperson(s) circa 9th December 2022, and our new specification chairs will begin their term of office prior to 2023.

This process may be adjusted at any time by the governing board, and feedback to improve the process is always welcome, with the optic of ensuring that we continually refine the process as time progresses.

For This Specific Election

For the nomination period, we happen to have two people well versed in license compliance (Steve and Helio) and two people with a security background (Jacob and Chris). This suggest that our co-chair election – for *this* specific election, should break into two threads: one license biased (two nominees) and one security biased (two nominees). The result will be two chairs to fill the co-chair positions after approval by the OpenChain Governing Board.

However, for clarity, the intent is not to split the development of our licensing and security specifications into two different paths. The intent is that both chairs will work on both specifications by helping to collect community feedback and so on, with this feedback being provided to the Steering Committee for formal review and ratification if and when we decide to produce new versions of our standards.