Board decision on the NYC RFP

OWASP Community,

Yesterday your elected board decided not to have OWASP support an RFP to build a cybersecurity center of excellence in NYC.  The local NYC OWASP community did an awesome job working to meet the RFP requirements and assembling a team and a detailed proposal.

The team presented the submission generally during the past OWASP BOD call February 7th and in all details during the executive meeting afterwards.

We decided (unanimously) not to support the proposal at an organizational level for a couple of very basic reasons:

1. The activities would be geographically focused in NYC. As a global entity, we should prioritize activities with a global interest.
2. The activities potentially involve a commercial interest which we feel can introduce a conflict of interest to our mission.
3. The foundation has substantial commitments and existing priorities with AppSec conferences, Projects and Chapters, which are already stressing our existing resources. 
4. We believe both the RFP process and further work around this initiative would be a significant amount of work for the Foundation staff, which could introduce risk to the core mission of OWASP.

With decisions that involve large amounts of effort, money and direction we expect people to have strong opinions and ideas.  We feel an acute responsibility as your elected board to work to make the best decisions we can for the global OWASP community - to direct our activities and funds toward our mission, which is an open global application security community.  We deeply appreciate everyone’s contributions.

Thank you.

On behalf of the OWASP BOD,

    Martin Knobloch

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OWASP Chairman of the BOD