I don’t think it’s a problem to require candidates to be Basic members. If OSI accepts the qualification of representing an affiliate organization, I don’t think it’s necessary to force them to bear any further burden, even if it’s a small amount.
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Why do we need the OSI nowadays, the message is out there. Really the OSI should splinter off into faction groups, small managable outliers that do a single thing and do it well. What spinter cells do the OSI have, do they have GNU, the GPL, the MPL? They need to make their own AI something to call their own advancement for furthering humanity
I agree. How can it be that you believe that you can positively contribute as a Board member but hold the organization in such disdain that you won’t even join it?
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That is wrong for at least 3 different reasons. #1: OSI does not do KYC procedures or afaik have any measures which attempt to identify that an OSI member was the person who owned the money donated in the name of that member. #2 Companies commonly donate to OSI and by design, they often do not represent any person. #3 I’m sure OSI is happy to accept anonymous cash if it showed up. At FSF, where I work, we commonly accept anonymous donations in Bitcoin, Litecoin and cash, and we encourage gifting memberships to other people. https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/
This has drifted off-topic. If there is more interest in discussing how OSI accepts donations, we can move this to a new thread.
Just a clarification below:
I had to google KYC 
so, no we don’t do bank-level identification of our small donors. But, contrary to other non-profits in our space, we ask donors to specify the state (or nation) they’re donating from and we only accept donations via traceable means (we don’t deal with cash nor cryptocoins). This is our process at the moment.
If it’s small change (like at a conference), we generally don’t accept it: too much work and we don’t have a process in place to deal with it. In our experience, people at conferences don’tt walk around with $50 bills in their pocket to drop in a bucket but rather want to donate by swiping their watches (I know…)
If an anonymous donor showed up with a pile of money to give us, we’d have to discuss if and how to take it, honestly. We don’t have a process to deal with this eventuality (I believe it happened once a long time before I joined OSI.)
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“Disdain” seems totally unfounded to me. Bradley stated a principled objection to joining at Repeated Mistakes Lead to Unfair OSI Elections - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn ).
More generally, OSI board aims to make decisions which impact billions of software users, almost none of them are OSI members. Suggesting a litmus test of them joining as an individual member at the 11th hour of a board election is silly. Judge their ideas, experience, skills, ethics, etc.
I joined OSI in order to vote on its board and that is certainly not necessarily a vote of confidence in the current organization.
I think Bradley takes his memberships and their implied endorsements seriously. He also takes things he’s agreed to seriously. For example, the statement I quoted above is not supportive of non-OSI members as realistic legitimate board candidates. However, the OSI board decided they were valid at some point in the past (or they made an accidental oversight.) If Bradley was an OSI board member who had signed a board member agreement to “support publicly all Board decisions”, I think he would have avoided publicly stating such a sentiment unless he knew the original decision was just an oversight and then he would have mentioned that.
PS @stefano, +1 for keeping the thread on-topic, I’m happy to see moderators move off-topic replies into new threads or make users repost elsewhere.