2026 Election Pages are up, please review

[Andrew van der Stock]

Hi Board,

I've updated the Election landing page for 2026 to include the new details, including ranked-choice voting (STV) and the new Director's policy, and to fix many inconsistencies due to the previous bylaws and policy being obsoleted. 

Please review the landing page and the 2026 timeline page here:

Landing Page: https://board.owasp.org/elections

2026 Page (linked from the landing page): https://board.owasp.org/elections/2026_elections

Let me know if you have any questions or improvements you'd like to see.

Changes and some things we should probably look at getting done before the election starts on October 15:

I've included a proposed date for the Candidate Community Town Hall on October 6. This was scheduled at the very last minute last year, and few took part. 

I validated the consistency of the election landing page and the timeline page against our election pages, our bylaws, relevant policies, and agreements. Recent changes to the bylaws and Directors policy significantly altered the candidate requirements, so I wanted to make sure it was accurate and consistent. I used Claude to anaylze the above documents, and I found a few as well. I validated all of the AI findings myself. They are documented below, and include a PR to make the necessary changes. Most are small, but one that is missing is that we don't document the Vice Chair role, and we are missing section 6.9, so I believe we need to fix both those issues. I've crafted the changes as a combined PR. 

I've already fixed the misspellings and typos that aren't in policies or bylaws, but the ones that are policies or bylaws will need to be amended by a PR. I've created a pull request to get this done. We should probably push the PR through the community review process starting as soon as possible, so we can get the changes to the bylaws and Director's policies done before the election starts on October 15. 

Discovered inconsistencies that need addressing:

• Bylaws 3.8(a) says Directors are elected "by a plurality of the votes," which sits awkwardly with the STV/ranked-choice method now mandated by the Director's Policy. A future bylaws amendment could reconcile this. (My change punts the method to the Directors policy)
• Bylaws 2.12 still refers to "the Alliance" (template leftover),  (This is a small change and should just be removed.)
• Article VI skips Section 6.9. (As in this section was completely missing. We are also missing a Vice Chair section, so I created a replacement for section 6.9 to document the Vice Chair role, based on our previous practices. This is the biggest change that is requested, and should be included in the bylaws, as it's one of the officer roles we've consistently elected since 2012.)
• Director's Policy B.4 reads "no less than fourteen (14) and no more than (20) days" — missing the word "twenty". (This is a small change that should just be made.)
• The Antitrust policy is still marked "(DRAFT WIP)" but both election pages link to it as if final. (This policy needs to go through the community review process asap and pass before the election)
• FIXED The Commitment Agreement has "I have possess" (typo) and the URL slug "committment" is misspelled — presumably fixed only if you want to break links. (Fixed as this is not policy, but an agreement). I've fixed the URL in all places it appears; that's the only change to those files.
• FIXED The redrafted timeline assumes candidate pages go live with the September 10 announcement (per policy) rather than October 1 as originally drafted. If operationally you need the October 1 date, the Director's Policy itself would need amending. (This does need fixing before the elections are called. (This has been fixed by making the date the 15th of September in the 2026 election timeline). 

Proposed bylaws and director policy fixes are relatively minor, and they can be found here:

https://github.com/OWASP/www-policy/pull/170

This could be passed by the Board, but I would suggest putting it through the community review process because it creates the Vice Chair role as the missing section 6.9, which we somehow missed during passing the bylaws.

thanks,

Andrew van der Stock
Distinguished Lifetime Member

Executive Director, OWASP

+1 510 697 9315