Nix Steering Committee Election 2024

Announcements
1

As a first step towards a better governance for official Nix projects, we are happy to announce the kick-off of the first Nix Steering Committee election!

The Steering Committee will be the primary community leadership body, responsible for steering the official Nix projects – organisationally, socially, and technically. This includes making decisions over what is official, managing teams, approving NixOS Foundation policies relevant for the community, being the final escalation point, and more as detailed in the Nix Governance Constitution.

While the Steering Committee is given the authority to make decisions within the scope of its responsibilities directly, it is expected to delegate as much as possible.

Participating

Automatically eligible voters will be sent an email and be added/invited to the @NixOS/voters-2024 GitHub team. If you’re on the GitHub team but have not received an email, make sure to check and optionally update your email address.

If you’re neither on the GitHub team nor have received an email, you’re likely not automatically eligible. In this case you may consider requesting an exception.

Members of the GitHub team can:

If you have any questions or need support, please get in touch with the Election Committee.

Timeline

  • 2024-09-29 Sun: Deadline for nominations
  • 2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for endorsements and candidate forms
  • 2024-10-03 Thu: Deadline for candidate questions
  • 2024-10-06 Sun: Deadline for candidate answers, submitting voter exceptions and updating voter email addresses
  • 2024-10-07 Mon: Voting starts
  • 2024-10-20 Sun: Voting ends
  • 2024-10-23 Wed: Results announced

The results are expected to be announced just before NixCon 2024 in Berlin, which starts on 2024-10-25.

46 Likes
3

FWIW, I got the email, but was not pinged by the voters team mention in the issue. I am on the team, though, so maybe GitHub choked on it?

4

@winter Thanks for the report, I’m currently investigating this problem

5

My guess is that you added people to the team after posting the issue? Or just that GitHub is being GitHub.

6

I did explicitly wait for everybody to be invited first, so I don’t think that should be it, but yeah it could just be GitHub being GitHub. Let’s discuss it in the election support Matrix room instead of here though.

1 Like
7

Where did 25 come from? I have 21 contributions in the relevant time period – am I really not welcome to participate?

I’m aware that there is a way to request exceptions, but I don’t really have much to add other than that I also have a few PRs that weren’t merged but that were part of a process of working towards a change that was eventually merged.

How hard a limit is the 25 contributions supposed to be? It just seems awfully high as a threshold to participate in the community.

3 Likes
8

@IvanMalison We had to pick some number and that comes with tradeoffs. 1 is obviously too little and 1000 is obviously too much. We used a plot and input from various people to help with that decision.

8 Likes
9

Hi! Is membership in the Github NixOS organization a requirement for voting? I tried to update my email address in the voters.json file, but the repo won’t let me add a pull request.

10

Yeah you need to be part of the NixOS organisation. Since you’re automatically eligible but weren’t part of the organisation already, you should’ve received an invite by email. Once accepted you’ll be able to make a PR to change your email. If the invite didn’t work, please join the election support Matrix channel to hash it out together :slight_smile:

1 Like
11

Yeah I saw that plot, but it seems weird to me to look at the plot and target a particular voting pool size, rather than try to come up with an a priori estimate of what level of contribution ought to be required to participate in the community.

25 just seems pretty high to me. Personally, I feel like I am well past the “level of investment in and contribution to the community” that should be required as a minimum for having some say.

3 Likes
12

Recently we kicked off the first election for the Nix Steering Committee as a major step towards a renewal of project governance.

Since starting this election, we’ve had a lot of engagement in the election repository with 25 nominees being endorsed by more than 80 different people.

We’re now approaching the end of the nomination phase with some upcoming deadlines:

Furthermore, if you’re a nominee yourself:

  • 2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for accepting the nomination and submitting the candidate form.
  • 2024-10-06 Sun: Deadline for answering questions you’d like to answer.

Following these dates, the final list of confirmed candidates along with their forms is expected to be published on 2024-10-04 Wed, while voting starts on 2024-10-07 Mon.

Note that deadlines are in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning submissions are still valid as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12).

5 Likes
13

We’ve now reached the end of the nomination phase, ending up with 25 confirmed candidates!

All candidate forms have now been published together:

We’re also confirming that there are no same conflicts of interests among the candidates, meaning that there will be no further need to take the constitutional conflict of interest restrictions into account.

Candidate Q&A deadline

Until this Thursday, eligible voters can still ask questions to candidates, and are encouraged to do so. Note that questions can also be based on the candidates forms.

Until this Sunday, candidates can answer questions they’d like to answer.

Voter exceptions deadline

Until this Sunday, voter exceptions can be requested if you’re not already an eligible voter.

The voting phase starts on Monday and will last for almost 2 weeks until 2024-10-20 Sun.

4 Likes
14

Candidates for the first Nix Steering Committee have now been selected, and the voting phase of the election has begun. The list of voters is now final, and the deadline for exception requests and updating emails has passed.

You must cast your vote by 2024-10-20 Sun in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12). After the poll is closed, votes will not be accepted for any reason.

We will send a reminder to vote on 2024-10-18 Fri.

The Candidates

Please inform yourself about the candidates by looking at their candidate info documents, which include:

  • Basic contact info
  • A conflict of interest disclosure
  • A statement on their motivation to be on the Steering Committee
  • All Q&A questions answered by the candidate, followed by ones not answered

Each candidate’s individual info document is also linked on the ballot.

How to vote

To be able to vote, you need to activate your email in the voters.json file with CIVS by following the steps on the CIVS Activate User page.

If you already did so, you should’ve already received an email from civs@cornell.edu with a link to the poll.

If you’re only activating your email now, you will get a link to the poll in the activation page under “Pending poll invitations”. If you missed this, you can go through the email activation again.

If you have a question, please contact the Election Committee.

6 Likes
15

Unfortunately the CIVS poll we used for the election got corrupted due to technical issues out of our control. A symptom of the problem is that the system appears to allow voters to vote multiple times. As such we are invalidating the existing poll, please hold off voting for a new future poll instead. Already submitted ballots appear to be irrecoverable. We apologise for the inconvenience.

According to the CIVS admin, a data corruption like that has never been seen before. The CIVS FAQ (archive link) implies this to be first time data has been lost since 2006. As far as we understand, the Berkley DB files got corrupted in such a way that at least the table of the voters who have voted is not handled correctly anymore.

We have no insight into the CIVS server, but are in contact with the admin to try figure out what went went wrong in more detail and how to best proceed. We will follow up with another announcement no later than this Friday.

Email updates possible again for now

As a consequence of the above, we can again allow email updates until the new poll is started. To do so, follow these steps.

The candidates

You can also still prepare yourself to vote by looking at the candidates.

9 Likes
16

Because we don’t have sufficient confidence in the CIVS problem not reoccurring again, we have decided to use OpaVote to collect the ballots instead. We’re still going to use CIVS tallying of the results, so that they won’t get influenced based on how ballots are collected. Note that OpaVote (like CIVS) allows the voters to get an anonymised list of all the ballots cast, and we will enable this after the election.

Unlike CIVS, OpaVote doesn’t require a separate activation step for emails, so all eligible voters with email addresses considered valid will be sent emails with the voting link from noreply@opavote.com, as well as voting reminders every 3 days.

You must cast your vote by 2024-11-03 23:59:59 Sun in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12). After the poll is closed, votes will not be accepted for any reason.

Note that, unlike CIVS, OpaVote does not allow to correct your ballot once cast! Furthermore, you cannot rank two candidates the same, except for unranked candidates. We will treat all the unranked candidates as tied for the last place when tallying.

Removed email addresses and how to set them

Because OpaVote’s terms has potential sanctions for undeliverable emails and doesn’t have a separate email activation step like CIVS, we have removed some voter email addresses that couldn’t be reached.

We cannot change the voter emails where the voting link has been delivered, but for missing and bouncing addresses, users can still update their email address. Everybody without an email address in voters.json will be notified once more.

10 Likes
17

I know it’s a bit late for this, but I have a colleague whom is a bit of a voting systems nerd who questioned the use of “proportional / best candidate” mode proposed to rank the results of the voting as per GitHub - NixOS/SC-election-2024: 2024 Election for the Steering Committee , particularly the “best candidate” part of that.

And indeed I looked at Condorcet Internet Voting Service to see what that meant, and it doesn’t seem ideally compatible with our desire to elect more than one person in a single election.

Best candidate. In best-candidate mode, the voter’s goal is to get a single very good candidate elected, and the quality of other elected candidates is a strictly secondary consideration. This is appropriate for an election where the voter really only cares about the best candidate: for example, the selection of a set of entree dishes for a menu, where the voter will only eat one of the entrees. Here, two committees are compared using their best candidates (according to the voter); other candidates are considered only if the voter has no preference between the best candidates. In the examples above, x would be preferred to yz in either case, because x is preferred to y. If the most-preferred candidate in each committee is equally preferred, then the second-most preferred candidate is used, and so on up to candidate f.

I think the alternative “Combined weights mode” would make more sense.

Can anyone give a defense for why Best Candidate mode is a sensible way to rank our votes?

3 Likes
18

There is no proportional representation component to this election, right? That makes it a particularly bad choice.

I’m somewhat familiar with social choice theory. Rank aggregation is not a straightforward thing. This is worthy of some consideration.

In my opinion, the most theoretically justifiable method is Kemeny-Young. Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to compute. Maybe someone will take that as a fun challenge :wink:

1 Like
20

(This is not in any way an aligned answer from a group, but this does reflect how I perceived — and participated in — some of the relevant discussions within NCA)

On the one hand, even combined weights combines the weights of your best candidates, so it is less «combined weights» than it sounds.

On the other hand, this makes the semantics of addition of scores complicated, too.

On the third hand, if SC needs to be able to represent community opinions in internal discussions, it is important for the process to work to trust at least one person there to represent the arguments from the contributors, including yours, well. It won’t be all about voting, the SC is small enough to also do some figuring out what’s going on.

On the fourth hand, there are skeletons in the closet for proportional-Condorcet in general in terms of what exactly the tallying produces, and there are drawbacks to STV too and some people like the general properties of Condorcet that still apply here and it’s all complicated. (The choice is limited to approaches with some proportionality and there are not that many available in terms of implementation)

On the fifth hand, it looks like ranked-choice popularity compared to range-voting is partially related to the fact that there are slightly more people for whom it is easier to rank than to score with any useful level of detail.

On the sixth hand, the popularity of ranked-choice voting provided us with an easier fallback as «rank as many as you wish» is available in many places and high-level-of-detail scores are more niche.

On the seventh hand, given that all approaches of summarising have significant complications and drawbacks, the question of limiting the level of detail the voter can swerat over to not too little not too much is relevant.

So it is all somewhat messy in any case, and the octopus says hi and waves with the eighth hand.

4 Likes
21

All that said, if we know we’re using proportionate representation ranking, the CIVS docs really can’t be clearer about which mode is applicable wrt to best-candidate vs. combined-weights in a multiwinner election:

Combined weights. In combined-weights mode, the voter gives a nonnegative weight to each candidate instead of ranking the candidates. The voter’s goal is to maximize the sum of weights of selected candidates. This is an appropriate criterion for elections where the quality of all the candidates is important to the voters, such as the election of an actual committee that will be voting on some issues.

https://civs1.civs.us/proportional.html

The SC is “an actual committee that will be voting on some issues”. In which case, the CIVS docs plainly say “use ‘combined weights, don’t use best-candidate’”. I’m concerned that the decision to use best-candidate mode was just an oversight, and I have no idea what impact it will have on the outcome, because it seems like a nonsensical choice for any multiwinner election.

1 Like