On December 24 the first election for OpenID Foundation community board members ended. It was the first time members of the OpenID Foundation could actually vote. Foundation members could nominate themselves and by the end of the nomination phase 17 people ran for seven community seats.
Elected for 2-year terms are Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, Chris Messina, and David Recordon. Elected for a 1-year term are Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton, and Brian Kissel. Congratulations to all of them! The community board members are taking office today. In addition to the community board members there are five corporate board members: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, VeriSign, and IBM.
While the majority of former community board members were nominated, it is interesting to note that only two of them were actually re-elected: David Recordon and Scott Kveton. I guess, that doesn’t necessarily mean the old board did a bad job but it certainly means that many Foundation members think it’s time to change a few things. In my opinion, a focus of the new board has to be on marketing. The OpenID Foundation has to illustrate the benefits of OpenID to both users and companies. There have to be more people who actually use their OpenID and there have to be more companies and services which offer logins with OpenID. The new board has good chances to accomplish this as it is more diverse now. It’s not only a North American board anymore but an international one - Snorri is French and Nat is Japanese - and people have a more diverse background, I think.
There is a lot of work ahead and I wish the new board good luck! If you want to support the work of the OpenID Foundation you can become a member. The membership fee has been reduced from $100/year to $25/year for individuals.