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.
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.
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.
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.
