Feb 16, 2026 • by Joshua Wise

Nominate yourself for the Board of Directors!

Hi, there! For those of you who have been following the Rebble Dev Forum, you might have noticed that we’re gearing up for elections for the Rebble Foundation Board of Directors! I’m writing this blog post to tell you that self-nominations for the Board are now open for the next two weeks, and that you (yes, you, dear reader!) should run for a seat on the Board!

As many of you know, the Rebble Foundation is the non-profit organization that keeps Rebble running. The general idea of a non-profit is that, instead of shareholders, investors, or owners, we have bylaws and a Board of Directors that governs how we do our work. Since we don’t have shareholders, the Board is responsible solely to Rebble’s mission, rather than trying to make money for anyone in particular. In order for that to happen effectively, we depend on everyday members of the Rebble community to step up and guide that work!

So if you’re interested in that kind of thing, well, this is the post that has more information for you – read on.

What’s the election process?

I’m glad you asked! This year, all five seats on the Board are up for election (though the election rules guarantee that at least two members of the previous Board will carry over, so that we preserve some continuity). For more details on exactly how it works, you can read all the nitty-gritty details, but in short, here are the key timeframes:

• Starting today, Monday, February 16th, 2026: Board nominations are open! Prospective members have two weeks to nominate themselves by submitting the self-nomination form.
• Sunday, March 1st, 2026, end of day anywhere-on-Earth: Nominations close.
• Monday, March 2nd, 2026: Voting begins! Every eligible Rebble user (that is to say, a Rebble user that created their account before the cutoff) can submit a ballot, ranking Board candidates in order. (More info on that soon!)
• Monday, March 9th, 2026, end of day anywhere-on-Earth: Voting ends. Votes are tallied by an instant-runoff vote, according to the election rules.
• Thursday, March 12th, 2026: The current Board meets to ratify the election results. Results are announced immediately afterwards, and the new Board’s term is effective immediately!

What does a Board member do?

OK, here’s where I get to a little bit of opinion rather than unshakeable truth. But in my mind, there’s three major tasks for a Board member, with roughly equal importance.

1. Keep the lights on. There are day to day, boring, administrative tasks involved in running a non-profit. The services that we currently run have to keep running. There are external entities that we have to interface with. We have to pay our taxes and our cloud bills. Elections have to run. There are not a lot of these things, but they exist! They don’t just happen on their own; people on the Board makes them happen, and will have to divide up this work.

2. Dream big things. The whole point of what we are doing with Rebble is to believe that things can be better than they are. We have to dream big! If we had all the time and money that we wanted to spend on this kind of thing, what could we do? What’s the best possible option for all things Pebble? In my mind, you can’t pick the best thing to reasonably do without dreaming of what could be better – and some of the best ideas that have been had in this space (say, a Pebble itself! or RWS!) seemed impossible to begin with. The Board is the guiding force for where Rebble goes, and has the responsibility for seeing not just today but far into the future.

3. Do realistic things. On the other hand, even when we dream big, it’s still inevitably true that we’re constrained by what we have in front of us. The Board’s responsibility is also to make Rebble the best we can, right here – and that means to pick some projects that the Board can reasonably accomplish in its term, commit to them, and make them happen. Members of the Board don’t have to be the experts who do the work themselves – a great example of that is our recent work on microPebble on iOS, where we amplified our capabilities by paying an external firm! But the Board’s job is to take little baby steps all the time, and make things happen.

Of course, this is just my opinion. What the actual job of the next Board is, is entirely up to the next Board to decide! And, as a result, the amount of time commitment that should be expected on the Board also would vary. But my suspicion is that the things that I have listed above are a few hours of work a week – say, 2 to 5 hours, depending on what’s going on – and less than that may not be serving the constituent body of Rebblers adequately.

One thing that I want to note is that previous Board have set guidance for future Boards, but it’s not set in stone. If you agree with the above, I of course encourage you to run. But even if you disagree with the above, or you disagree with choices that the Board has made in the past, I still encourage you to run! Non-profits run better when they are lead by people who care about them – and, inherently, people who care bring a variety of ideas to the table, and not all of them agree with each other. In my mind, it’s more important that a future Board member cares about the importance of Rebble as an entity than that they agree with me on everything!

How do I run?

Ah, now we’re on to the fun part. To be a candidate for the Rebble Foundation Board election, you need to submit a self-nomination form by the end of the day, Sunday, March 1st. On the self-nomination form, you’ll be asked to fill in a few things:

• How should we name you? Tell people what name you’d prefer for people to call you by, and what your online presences are; list any relevant usernames, etc., that Rebblers might know you by.
• Who are you, and what are some of the main contributions you’ve made to the Rebble community? In 500 words or fewer, give us a quick introduction to yourself! How have you been connected to the Pebbleverse in the past? What do people know you for, and what skills will you bring to the Board?
• If you are elected, what do you intend to do in your capacity as a Foundation board member? In 500 words or fewer, tell us how you’d use your term on the Board! Why should Rebblers vote for you? What’s your dream for what Rebble should become? What do you think the Board ought reasonably get done in a year, and how do you plan to make it happen?
• Do you have any potential conflicts of interest with your responsibilities as a Foundation board member? It’s not in the slightest bit disqualifying if you do, but Rebblers should know what other obligations you might have – and how you plan to manage them.

These nomination items will appear publicly next to your name on the ballot for Rebblers to decide on their next Board.

To get your creative juices flowing, I’ll give you an example of what I’d write about myself if I were running for this term. (I’m not, since I’ve got an enormous amount of stuff going on in my personal life over the next few months and should probably sit this term out! But fear not, I’ll still be around the Pebbleverse, and I’ll hope to run for a future Board when I have time to give it my all.)

What’s your name? Joshua Wise; you might know me as joshua or @jwise0 on Discord, or @jwise on GitHub.

Who are you and what are your main contributions? I’ve been around since the very early days of Pebble, in the #pebble channel on Freenode (RIP)! I helped set up the early Rebble Web Services infrastructure, and I’ve been maintaining it for the last 5 or 6 years. I built a bunch of the admin console for Rebble Web Services. In years past, I worked with ginge on the early RebbleOS efforts, and a test board I designed in 2019 was the first non-Pebble hardware to successfully run a PebbleOS watchface; once PebbleOS became open source, I also wrote the first prototype of PebbleOS on Core 2 Duo for Core Devices. Recently, I’ve been mostly doing administrative work for the Foundation as the Treasurer.

What do you intend to do as a Board member? My biggest goal for a 2026 Board term is to continue down the path of having a sustainable, independent Pebble ecosystem. Concretely, there are two things I would focus my energy and the Foundation’s resources on: getting microPebble into a state where it can be a daily driver, bringing PebbleOS back to life on legacy devices (snowy, etc), and continuing to support the community’s work on beautiful visual design for Pebble apps. (I have dreams about having new independent Pebble hardware, too! But I imagine that those aren’t a near-term project.)

Do you have any conflicts of interest? My day job is as half of Accelerated Tech, Inc., which has previously done contract work both for Rebble and for Core Devices. Accelerated Tech is not currently engaged with either of those clients. I would recuse myself from any vote involving Accelerated Tech.

Of course, you don’t have to agree with all of my plans! And although I’ve been around the Pebbleverse approximately forever, there is no expectation that a Board member need have been around as long as I have (indeed, I would welcome seeing some fresh faces on the Board!). But the thing that really matters is that you have to nominate yourself before the deadline.

I’m really looking forward to seeing people running for Board positions. It’s been such a joy to see the Rebble developer community take shape again over the past few years. From the bottom of my heart, thanks to all of the people who have been here to make it happen!

Yours,
joshua