This thread and all others like it asks us to engage in an extra-democratic pressure campaign that will at best erode representation, fail to achieve any meaningful goals of its proponents, fail in the wider election it seeks to force, and fail to bring an end to the governance instability weighing on the community. This is at best a haphazard effort to confirm representation that will instead result in greater risk of further chaos. Some of what some people want can be achieved. Processes can be improved. But this is not the way.
Forcing Churn in Representation is Anti-Democratic
All of us understand computer science. Asking every community member to be active in every single decision has poor computational complexity, growing in costs proportionate to both proposals and community members. It is also an inefficient use of expertise and knowledge on specific subjects, allowing disinformation to rule more easily. These ad-hoc campaigns rely on completely inefficient participation that is smartly tuned out by most of the community because the process is so inefficient, prone to misinformative political tactics, and hopelessly unfair.
Representation is the foundation of fair, efficient participation and the creation of legitimate authority that can be recognized broadly throughout the community and can concentrate authority with expertise. Calls to reconstitute representation over and over without mechanisms to improve the efficiency of its creation are a mechanism of wearing out participants until representation becomes sufficiently disproportionate to achieve disproportionate outcomes.
Organizing on Discourse to demand repeated reconstitution of representation is extra-democratic, bypassing existing representation. It leaves the community vulnerable to employment of inflammatory tactics and engineered overreactions that demand for rash actions outside the normal process. When those rash actions demand damaging representation instead of actions to be taken by representatives, the result is not a democratic function but instead a move towards populist mob rule or something else less democratic and less representative.
Narrow Pressure Campaigns Fail at the Polls
Anyone expecting the vote to swing significantly, especially if convinced by narrow-interest activism in ceaseless Discourse threads, is likely to be rudely awakened when the selection bias is removed. Purported members of the “go back to sleep” vote are, by virtue of being involved here, activists, demonstrating the depth of lack of self-awareness or perhaps just plain old political dishonesty or self-deception.
Token Gestures Accomplish Nothing
The desired outcome, exclusion of Anduril, is a token gesture that will not affect Anduril or any other weapons developers in the US or Russia or Israel or any other nation nor change the policies or actions of the US. The correct place to affect US politics is through US elections or your representative national elections via the creation of effective multilateral influence on the US. How can we ask a broad coalition of the NixOS community to support an action that will have zero effect on the issue they seek to effect while also disrupting development of NixOS and requiring us to gatekeep an otherwise open exchange of code and ideas? The minority interest gains nothing of real substance while the broader community loses.
Majority Rule vs Minority Rights
The correct way to balance majority rule versus minority rights is to constitute coalitions of minorities, recognizing a clear understanding of several niche interests, honing proposals through the inherent robustness afforded by collaboration among several other independent minority interests. This means minorities need to understand each other’s niche interests. Together, they can support passage of interests specific to each minority even when those interests are not yet popular overall. Attempting instead to concentrate authority with a minority denies other minority interests of an important ally while threatening to ram through other untested policies that might even go against the direct interests of a majority, meaning no minority coalition could ever get them to pass.
Only Those Who Want the Process to Work Will Succeed
We have normalized overreactions to pressure campaigns, partly because the original BDFL model was not representative. What instead must be normalized is allowing representatives to represent, at most demanding specific policies to be adopted by the representatives through organizations of users with proven representative backing.
Until people want a working process and want to let it work, they will never earn the trust from votes that can be found on Github but rarely vocal in these threads. Those users have a strong incentive to vote against factions that will ask them to vote over and over or else lose representation. They have a strong incentive to vote against those who appear to be fomenting endless instability.
Twisting the arm of the community by forcing everyone to watch ceaseless turmoil until your stated objectives are achieved, especially token gestures, is very likely to attract significant blowback to the point that people begin asking instead for disruptive influences to be removed if they won’t use the legitimate process.
Focus on Process, Not Outcomes
Specific proposals to improve the function of the representatives or the constitution of representation inherently serves many interests. Specific outcomes such as excluding Anduril have a more narrowly interested political base and are always less likely to pass than improvements to the upstream processes. Process improvements can include improvements to the dynamic constitution of natural political alliances that represent enough niche interests to constitute a multilateral majority.