A majority of those 1000-ish eligible voters? I don’t think we have nearly enough data for exactly that formulation
You know how we could gather enough data? By holding a full re-election.
Or we could put the full re-election itself on the ballot (meaning that if the voters approve a full re-election then the top 7 vote-getters are elected otherwise the election proceeds as before). However, John/Tom/Robert also opposed that idea, too.
I wasn’t implying that we have to gather the data, be it on those who are eligible or on those who actually voted last time (450). I was just pointing out that we do not have it and yet some people still do make these claims. Or other claims about what almost all of the community wants – just based on their feeling about what it’s in various discussion spaces – but that’s extremely biased sampling (I like statistics too much I guess).
Anyway, the initial post of this thread is gathering the data already, from one side at least (supporters).
This is what you should do.
I don’t think John, Tom or Robert should resign.
Usually in well run orgs with boards, or some governance structure, if there is a question of integrity, the people involved would submit to turn over evidence to some qualified 3rd party to objectively state what happened.
In the mean time, if a board, or steering committe, or whatever is deadlocked in for instance a cooperative org or similar, in order for the organization to be able to conduct business, you would usually have the cooperative members vote on decisions the board is stalemated on. Just let the community vote on whether to dissolve existing steering committee and hold another election. It’s just routine way to make decisions in an org with a structure like this one. Just having the community make the decision can help shut down the endless debates, petitioneering, etc. I don’t see what the big dilemma is. This is an organization, and it needs to use the tools available to make decisions, conduct business, and fulfill it’s purpose.
What argument did they give for that? That they don’t care if they’d not elected again because they’d… want to hold onto their seats anyways? Why???
Because that is probably the best possible way to do this.
I don’t doubt a second you would reason the same in their shoes. After all, they have received a mandate that lasts two years, and they probably think they can make a positive difference. It is not a difficult thing to comprehend.
While I haven’t had the perspective of having held such an elected position, I’m inclined not to read campaigns so far as personal so much as I believe they have been aimed at concrete changes in policy or governance - even when they’re about positions of individuals. I think only few would have delegates no longer run for their positions.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe delegates should necessarily yield to requests by any specific community member.
Rather, I would expect delegates to represent those parts of the community they feel they represent. It is then on delegates to individually gauge whether any specific sentiment in the community affects their mandate among the base they would like to represent.
I’d be interested to learn more about how you’d prefer to see things run. I tried a quick search by user name at the earlier zulip instance, but that didn’t really work.
w.r.t. stated concerns on mechanisms such as continuity here, I would agree those unfortunately run counter to change. As such, I would propose handling desired continuity through (temporary) advisory (rather than representative) roles.
Isn’t this just putting the pressure back on now that it looks like there’s again something John, Robert and Tom could potentially be convinced to go along with?
I think you’re saying none of this is personal, it’s all just working towards specific policy goals, and you’re saying it’s their decision. But then the quotes you give seem to be just complaining about the structure and work of the current SC in quite extreme terms. Like painting an incredibly dark caricature-like picture.
The policy idea is fundamental reform enacted by a fully newly elected SC with them staying on as temporary advisors?
EDIT: It also reads as incredibly dismissive of John and Tom’s expressed emotional experience.
An SC no-confidence vote means that SC member believes the current SC is unable to progress or that the relationship with the community is too damaged. Their threshold for “too damaged” might come whenever only a tenth of the community is demanding re-election, so they voted no-confidence, but it is illogical to extrapolate that vote to state that one seventh of the community is demanding re-election. Three members can even interpret the same sixth of voters as “the relationship is too damaged”. It’s still just a sixth, not three sevenths, and certainly not a majority.
The SC no-confidence was 3:3 at the high water mark. Since then it went back down to 3:1. What this demonstrates is why empowering legitimate representative processes is the right way forward. Had we given into governance by Discourse, we would already be wondering who has any authority at all, but already the working relationships in a smaller group are figuring things out faster than we can. That is a fundamental advantage of representative processes, improving communication efficiency by having fewer people in the room and fewer questions about representation behind every statement.
This entire series of waves started because the elected SC governed the unelected moderators, who had a strong interest in maintaining the rule-by-Discourse politics as a shadow power underneath any SC. Those who want self-selected Discourse activism to be more powerful than the elected representatives want their interests to be disproportionately served in the chaos that they will protect their capability to generate, giving the real community no rest until they get what they want.
This thread demonstrates how attempting to resolve every Nix governance action by Discourse leads to lengthy, tiring discussions that provide no clarity, are vulnerable to all sorts of distortions and biases, and in every single way worse than what this thread seeks to impair. I wish @Gabriella439 would recognize the advantages and get back in the boat. There are issues that you can form a voting majority on through minority alliance, but this is not one of them.
You mean like the SC members you talked to trusted you?
Please note that the absent votes were indeed just that—absences—and my position on the matter has not changed.
This probably deserves another wall of text about how there isn’t even an entity to be represented in the first place, or how the idea of representing any such entity would’ve been futile, or how this whole notion of representation is nearly orthogonal to any of the hypothetical needs of the project and is at best a proxy for the identification of such… but, friend, that is some Lunduke-grade conspiracies there
Yes. Exactly. Outside the SC. In multiple smaller groups. As we have before the SC, so we do now that the SC is throttling. I’m still curious to see what might come out of a functioning SC, which is why I think another reset (of the tension and the controversy) is not a bad idea.
I think your certainty is misplaced.
There are calls for filling the empty seats instead with the runner ups from last year, instead of a full reelection. I’ve not signed for that solution, despite the fact that I would guarantee me a seat on the SC without a vote.
So I’d literally not reason the same. I’d rather be elected properly this year.
Maybe just abolish the SC?
It would give you a seat on a mandate that would expire in weeks. While giving tomberek an extra year. I understand why you would not opt for that
… and would allow to sway the vote of no confidence in that time. So the terms do not actually matter.
That’s valid, and I’d be open to a call as well.
I don’t know enough about said demand for continuity to make that judgement on behalf of others, but no objections here.
I’d rather see unstaggered 6-month terms. I don’t see reforming a constitution that requires years for democratic recourse to take effect as extreme.
edit: the model being designed to resist change sounds historically accurate, stemming from the French revolution as a settlement between monarchist and bourgeois factions - notably both democratic minorities with not much incentive toward further change. to be fair, I’m more optimistic than those quotes, in the sense unlike the historical model we use ranked voting.
I had multiple bits to reply to - the composition of my post was the result of that.
From my perspective tho, I wouldn’t expect them to feel convinced tho, no - and that wasn’t the intent. Toward them I mainly wanted to challenge this woke mob notion - I believe in the processes I advocate for. I believe those to include their duty to not necessarily yield to positions even if those were (no data afaik) to be found majority positions.
This is because if majority positions are all that’s represented, the SC could no longer serve its role to represent the broader community anymore, thereby in effect devolving to a tribalist tyranny of the majority, rather than a place where representatives could progress on issues through dialogue.
In our setting that’s all the more crucial, given online contexts are already more prone to tribalism than live dialogue - something that’s unfortunately more challenging for us to reach at scale as a global community.
At some point, some elected SC is going to have to:
Even with a new SC, the current rules are the same and the same community will be represented in roughly the same proportions. We still need seven people to create decisions. We need SC members who have a romantic view of activism but don’t revert back into outside activists when it is their job to use authority, not talk to it. We need a community that agrees that representative systems are more efficient and then allows itself to be represented instead of incited into a pressure campaign by the first SC member who doesn’t get what they want.
The more people realize that changing the membership will only get us back to the exact same situation we already have, the faster we can realize that the only actual way forward is to wipe our eyes clear of the mud, reach into the mess, and start pulling the weeds out of the clogged sewer pipe. We can move beyond the current pressure campaign and start demanding process improvements that allow multi-lateral voting alliances to create decisive efficiency or we can invite new pressure campaigns in the future while having a lame duck SC and evaluating even less-tested SC candidates and pretending they will be more clean after we are done with them and they are done with each other.
The primary of the “current deficiencies” is the SC pretending like Constitution matters.
…which you can’t shield yourself from by “processes”. You have to rely on people’s judgement and on their reading the room.
Do we need that? Are they - “efficient”?
I’ll just say that, that Nixpkgs people I’ve met in person seem to have capacity for scepsis even when they are generally optimistic about “representation”, is one reason I still have hope and trust in this “community”.
That we probably all agree on! Now what is the mud, and what are the weeds in this metaphor?.. we might have opinions. I’d say, “pressure campaign” conspiracies and the presumption of bad intent is some of that junk in our eyelids
what changes would you foresee? couldn’t people cooperate already if they wanted?
I do not believe this was a hot-headed overreaction and I don’t appreciate you phrasing this like fact. The SC destroyed the moderation team due to their poor leadership. And yes, it is the SC’s fault.
I ranked a majority of last year’s election winners high on my ballot, and even endorsed one of them. I find them all brilliant people in their own ways. Today, I don’t think running the SC is right for any of them, because this failure was multi-faceted and enormous. This is despite wishing to see all of them continue to be valuable contributors in other ways.
This is not an overreaction. I still call for a full re-election.
Yes. Players need only understand the game to begin playing it. Expand your voting alliance by identifying things you can give at low political cost while receiving something you value more. Once you have a set of votes agreed upon, everyone in the alliance gets what they want. Helping players identify opportunities or lower the costs of moves is part of playing the game. Whoever begins playing early and plays with a degree of integrity with other players can create more cooperative moves faster, “winning” this non-zero-sum game in a sense.
Why didn’t they already? The same reason inexperienced programmers might loop through an array to check for membership. Improper problem analysis leads to irrational, sub-optimal moves. We’re also likely taking cues from the politics we see around us, but that’s politics for mere laypeople. We are mostly engineers.
IIRC even @Gabriella439 stated that several of the SC had independently reached the same conclusion about the mod to be removed. At that point, does the reason given even matter? The conversation was literally about protecting the dignity of everyone until the naive “whistleblower” didn’t read the assignment. I’m glad you bring this point back up. On a council where you are expected to negotiate deals with other members, which itself requires being vulnerable and honest about the political calculations, this breach of trust demonstrates that the “whistleblower” either has zero understanding of politics or set off with the objective of sabotaging their own seat on the council, failing their own voters. They succeeded only in spilling the mud into the main swimming area. I believe it’s a teaching moment. The next SC member to hold that seat will also come from this community and will need to learn the same lesson as our dear backstabbing friend, so they might as well learn it first by crawling back to the rest of the SC to offer votes where it might help.
The corner case of a representative system is to have a single decision maker. While that decision maker can be elected, making the system other than BDFL, it is the most decisive system. Whether it is efficient is a question for the principal-agent model of the problem. It’s efficient as long as the “dictator” is empowered to receive input from both the community’s expertise and representation. Expertise tends to be naturally concentrated with a few, so they are often very unique or acquire some natural biases that make them poor at representing broader interests, creating inefficiency due to poor alignment in spite of the highly skilled problem modeling. Connect both representation and expertise well to a decision maker and you will have an efficient process.
This is why I am not alone in suggesting that calling for elections without clear process improvements within the SC is just a knee-jerk that will only make things worse by making absolutely nobody want the job.
Start with a special election for the open seat and indirectly allow the community to vote no confidence by electing someone who runs simply on “no confidence.” Amend the constitution for faster consensus by having most decisions require just one SC member propose and one sortition selected member approve etc. Vote only when there is contention. Charge the SC to begin separating the technical and representative duties and structures to create consultative independence between expertise and community representation. Just some ideas. I am building my own technology enabled solutions every day for my actual work.
Any downstream political process is only as good as the honest understanding of the shared interest of the upstream parties driving the process. Many of us evidently had a very naive understanding of the dynamics of forming voting alliances. I would argue that this deficiency is cultural, endemic to this entire community and not something that can simply be fixed by putting a new slate of contestants into our cruel game of musical chairs. We have to learn as a community. We have to learn even if we have screwed up yesterday or today.
It is all a teaching moment. We arrive here at a thread that appears to be a zero-sum choice between fully replacing the SC or not, where only one side can win. In fact, by focusing on process design, by understanding voting alliances and using our computer science to efficiently share resources and design robust, efficient consensus processes, we can get back to the highly cooperative game of doing the hard work of improving Nix and NixOS and collectively wash our hands of what I hope not to recall.