This year’s OSMF board elections are open now and if you are an OSMF member you will be asked to vote (if not - you might want to consider joining the OSMF).

OSMF board elections are done with Single transferable vote (STV). Since this has caused confusion and misunderstanding in the past occasionally here a quick and politically neutral helper how to vote with STV:

The name says it already in fact: Single transferable vote. You only have a single vote and you cannot split it. But you can specify an order of priorities who to give this vote to. In almost all cases your vote will go to the candidate you put on top of your list. Only in the rare cases where your vote for this candidate would be wasted it is transferred to the next highest candidate on your list (and subsequently possibly even further down the list). This happens in either of two cases:

• your top candidate does not stand a chance because he/she has too few votes overall.
• your top candidate got so many votes he/she does not need your vote to win.

To help your decisions you can find the list of candidates and their manifestos on the wiki as well as questions by the community and answers of the candidates - where you also can still ask questions if you have any.