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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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
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.
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:
2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for endorsements of nominees without enough endorsements. You will not be able to vote for nominees that don’t have sufficient endorsements.
2024-10-06 Sun: Deadline for submitting voter exceptions and updating voter email addresses. You will not be able to vote if you cannot receive emails on the registered address.
Furthermore, if you’re a nominee yourself:
2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for accepting the nomination and submitting the candidate form.
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).
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.
