Last Friday the OSI Board held a special meeting to fill vacancies that had arisen by the departure of three directors – Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. Michael Tiemann left the Board after serving as OSI President for many years and leaves a large gap which the board will only fill thoughtfully; as a consequence, Martin Michlmayr, currently OSI Secretary, was temporarily appointed Acting President and the election of a full new President scheduled for a later meeting of the new Board. The Board warmly thanks all three for the contribution they have made to OSI.

After considerable discussion, the board selected 3 new directors to fill the available vacancies and maintain an 11 person board. For the first time we invited non-directors to recommend candidates as an essential first step towards a board representative of members. At last year’s Board elections, we expanded the board by one seat to accommodate an additional Board member. We decided to continue to fill that additional seat with a candidate identified by the Board, leaving two vacancies to be filled by candidates nominated by members of the new Affiliate scheme. Since there were three Affiliate nominees, we carefully considered all candidates and then held a ballot.

We are pleased to announce that Mike Milinkovich (of the Eclipse Foundation) and Luis Villa (nominated by the Mozilla Foundation) have been appointed as OSI directors. We are grateful for the other nomination from the Affiliates and for a while considered once again expanding the Board; selecting only two was not easy in the least. We also considered a number of other possible candidates and appointed well-known government community advocate Deb Bryant to fill the third director vacancy. The appointments become effective on April 1st as usual.