Regarding the 2025 Elections and the Linkedin post by Sam Johnston

[andrew-demarsh]

I’d like to make it known that a person known as Sam Johnston has seemingly come up with a list of current OSI members and has blindly connected them to users on Linkedin. See full thread as of 13:30 UTC Mon Feb 24th.

To be clear i might not have too many issues with people reaching out to me on LinkedIn about such a topic but i am irked by a couple things. There are a couple inaccuracies stating the board did not advertise the elections on social media or website is not true, see: Open Source Initiative :osi:: "The OSI board of directors is renewing 3 of its s…" - OSI Mastodon Open Source Initiative :osi:: "OSI’s board of directors in 2025: details about t…" - OSI Mastodon The choice of time as UTC is a fair time considering there are people across the globe that take place in the OSI and not showing a preference and instead following a technical standard seems fair and reasonable to myself and hardly some major oversight or boondoggle. On top of this it is not possible to respond to this post at all despite being mentioned in it. I’d also to be frank appreciate it if at some point cleaned up or clarified the process of external entities gaining access to members contact information. to say I was surprised to be quoted at in a LinkedIn post surrounding what appears to be a controversy with no means to reply and nothing i could see from the OSI with so many members linked was a bit concerning.

[stefano]

Hi Andrew, I’m sorry that this happened to you. We’ve received other complaints about his behavior recently, related to that post and others. Unfortunately we don’t have control over his behavior. All we could do is ban him from these forums after we witnessed multiple occurrences of his abusive behavior.

I don’t know how he managed to associate your name to an OSI membership: that information is privately kept by OSI on a secure server. We’re not aware of any unauthorized access to the server or the application that manages members data. Regardless, I’ve asked our IT person to investigate.

There may be another explanation (thanks for capturing evidence, too). From the list of contacts mentioned by the individual, I get the feeling he may have been keeping tabs of people who have commented on OSI’s posts. I see there names of current and former board members, names of people who work for current and past sponsors, people I know personally and (IIRC) made comments on posts I wrote on LinkedIn…

Do you remember writing in support, reposting or commenting about the Open Source AI Definition? Maybe that’s why he considered you a person of interest… Sorry again for that.