There was, of course, other stuff we covered in the retro, mostly having to do with troubleshooting CiviCRM. That material is not sharable for obvious reasons. Mostly we discussed how to improve elections in 2026, and beyond, and the report there covers the big things. We haven’t lost track of the little things (like candidate ordering on the elections page, which goes to the website team).
Beyond that, we’d love to know: how would you improve OSI elections, if it was your decision?
I’m encouraged that the board identified this as a primary problem area.
This election, as well as the OSAID process, made it apparent that our supporters want better channels to provide structured feedback to the Board about organizational direction, decisions, and priorities. Also, that it’s important to our supporters that feedback be clearly received and acknowledged, and that they receive word of any related board decision when one is made. Our elections are a poor vehicle for this kind of communication, so we must provide others.
The Board is working on a plan to reshape discussions with our supporters in order to realize better two-way communication. You can expect to hear more about this plan in upcoming months, and we hope you will help us improve it through your feedback.
Why is the plan more complicated than “be waaaaay more active on Discourse”? The channel exists, just need to use it imo.
What this election exposed was the need for the organization to also assess whether candidates were fully eligible to run and prepared to be seated on the board before voting begins. This is something we will add to the election timeline next year.
This seems an oblique reference to the fact that a last minute demand was made which amounted to changing the rules of the game during play, which Maffuli admitted in so many words in this telling thread.
What the retrospective post does not detail is how this “need to assess wether candidates are eligible to run” was discovered somehow when voting was already under way. To an onlooker without a direct stake in this, it looks suspiciously like meddling with procedures in order to steer outcomes. I do not utter this suspicion lightly; I cannot think of a good faith interpretation especially given OSI’s conspicuous silence on precisely this point. I would be happy to be proven wrong of course.
So in response to the question in the post, what improvements I would want to see, I think more transparency and, dare I say it, openness (e.g. about vote counts and lost/discarded votes) would be great.