Moderation is a complex topic. You usually don’t make friends, only enemies, while doing it. You never appear fair to most people when you punish them or their friends, and our brains expect a kind of tit for tat when we punish someone. So if we punish someone speaking out against the green team, people also expect us to punish the red team, to be fair and balanced.
Most people in the project are used to interacting with democracies. NixOS is not a democracy.
Democracies are built to protect the livelihoods and well-being of people who don’t have any other choice than to be part of it. NixOS is a community built of people who choose to be part of it. Respecting and understanding that choice is what allows us to be great.
We want more people to choose our community because we have a lot of work to do. We want NixOS to rule the (digital) world someday. NixOS itself is a meritocracy. People with a bigger impact should have a bigger say in the direction. Elections cannot fully grasp the complexity of that contribution investment, but they are a good enough approximation.
I’m deeply saddened by the SC’s choice to directly interfere with the Moderation team’s composition. Keeping a motivated Moderation team alive is a complicated and fragile endeavour for many reasons. This is what a significant part of my time over the last year has been spent on, and seeing it shattered makes me very sad. I also helped establish the SC and gave them the authority to oversee the moderation team, in the hope that I could communicate the need for autonomy.
Rerolling the SC completely is not a good idea. Knowledge outside moderation topics has to be passed on, and roles/jobs have to be done. Conducting a 5/7 election is already 2 positions more than the NCA planned, and I think it provides ample room for reforms. While I disagree with the remaining members on the moderation topic, I still think they are a valuable steering force.
We, as the NCA, gave the SC a lower public communication requirement to help speed them up. Writing public statements and redacting private information from meant-to-be-public logs is work that slows down the decision-making. Even without this requirement, we have a higher burn rate of SC members than I would have hoped for.
The post before mentions that we did not enforce the CoC consistently. I don’t feel that is the case, and I expressed my opinion that not all violations of the CoC have to be enforced the same. Speaking with violators first usually yields a better outcome than simply punishing them directly. Moderators are not machines but humans with context, understanding and friends. More often than not, the person you need to moderate is someone you know.
I understand why the moderation team resigned. I would have done the same if not in this special position. But I also understand why the SC wants to show actionability. I just think in this case the SC is misguided, and it is my fault for not communicating things earlier.