Nix Governance Constitution; draft for feedback

7c6f434c · August 30, 2024, 5:07pm

(The draft constitution below is officially approved by the entire assembly, and endorsed by the NixOS Foundation Board, but this context preamble is personally from me, @7c6f434c , as one of the assembly members)

After releasing Nix Community Values draft for feedback, we in the assembly have worked on preparing the next document based on the same underlying work of studying what people say, do, and do not do — here and elsewhere: a draft Nix Governance Constitution.

The current version of the constitution is posted for feedback. As with the values, please comment publically on Zulip, message us privately, or join an office hour.

Like the values, the constitution will not make everyone 100% happy, and none of us are perfectly 100% happy with the compromises chosen. However, we hope that the regularly elected Steering Committee (SC) established by the constitution will be able to fill the need for a clear source of authority and for escalation resolution. Of course, the absolutely dominating share of work and decisions is made at the level of maintainers of specific parts of the code (e.g. Nixpkgs packages); this is not going to change as long as the projects operate at the current scale.

We expect that constitution will evolve significantly faster than the values, but without frequent major changes, and much slower than some of the other formalised processes. Unlike the values, there are specific parts of the constution that we expect to be changed — but the data to make good choices will only come from the experience of applying the current version.

The NCA’s job will not be completely done after finalisation of the constitution: The NCA members will be the first Election Committee, and are thus ineligible to be elected, but will act as non-voting SC members for the first 6 months to hand over the context we have collected.

NCA has already had to update some of the project processes that in the future will be improved via simple-majority SC decisions; we might end up doing this again before the end of the SC election.

The constitution officially approved by the assembly for publication as a draft for feedback is at nix-constitutional-assembly/constitution.md at 9bc16f2f4f3ad95d4715ec2f73d013e0d2761203 · NixOS/nix-constitutional-assembly · GitHub (due to the Discourse message limits)

lassulus · August 30, 2024, 5:17pm

Infinisil · September 9, 2024, 8:56pm

Nix Governance Constitution Updates; to be finalised on 2024-09-16

We thank everybody for their private and public feedback for the constitution draft. Based on the feedback we’ve made a number of changes, ending up with the following release candidate for the constitution:

github.com

NixOS/nix-constitutional-assembly/blob/40b10e558583b20de6537ad5f36a08d39d6d9c80/constitution.md

# Nix Governance Constitution (draft)

## Introduction

This document describes the highest level of governance structure for projects under the NixOS Foundation.

## Overview

There are two primary leadership bodies with different scopes:
- The Steering Committee (SC), composed of 7 elected individuals to represent the community, is broadly responsible for technical and community decisions and delegation
- [The NixOS Foundation board](https://nixos.org/community/teams/foundation-board/), composed of the board members of the Stichting NixOS Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is broadly responsible for legal, financial and partnership decisions and delegation

This constitution roughly comprises these parts:
- The detailed responsibilities of each body
- How SC decisions are made
- How the SC is elected

## Detailed Responsibilities

### Steering Committee

This file has been truncated. show original

We plan to finalise this version on 2024-09-15T22:00:00Z, so let us know if you have any last concerns.

As the constitution is finalised, we will also kick off the first Steering Committee election, stay tuned!

Infinisil · September 16, 2024, 6:52pm

We thank everybody for their final feedback. We have decided to move ahead with the finalisation with just some minor additional changes. The finalised version is

github.com

NixOS/nix-constitutional-assembly/blob/00b53920442a5077fa8c295a9955042e45080323/constitution.md

# Nix Governance Constitution

## Introduction

This document describes the highest level of governance structure for official Nix projects.

## Overview

There are two primary leadership bodies with different scopes:
- The Steering Committee (SC), composed of 7 elected individuals to represent the community, is broadly responsible for technical and community decisions and delegation
- [The NixOS Foundation board](https://nixos.org/community/teams/foundation-board/), composed of the board members of the Stichting NixOS Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is broadly responsible for legal, financial and partnership decisions and delegation

This constitution roughly comprises these parts:
- The detailed responsibilities of each body
- How SC decisions are made
- How the SC is elected

## Detailed Responsibilities

### Steering Committee

This file has been truncated. show original

While we believe the constitution to be good enough for a start, it can be changed if necessary.

It should now be added to the homepage, for which we’ve opened a tracking issue. We’d be grateful for somebody to pick up the implementation of that while we focus on the first SC election!