The Nix Steering Committee recently met for the first two times alongside the members of the former Nix Constitutional Assembly to help kick things off. We used these initial meetings to focus on both meta issues (“How should we operate?”) and specific agenda items (“What fires do we need to put out urgently?”) and in this post we wanted to summarize some of the outcomes of the “meta” discussion.
Values
There were a few general values that arose from that discussion:
- We prefer to be proactive rather than reactive
- We want to speak and act as a single voice
- We also obviously want to be effective
We’re still sorting out the details of what those mean, but those were recurring themes.
Communication
One of the first practical things we had to sort out was how we would communicate with the rest of the community.
When interacting with the community we will:
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Be reachable collectively through a group email: steering@nixos.org
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Remain reachable as individuals via Matrix for feedback and suggestions
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Post official decisions and announcements in the Steering Committee category of the NixOS Discourse
Posts in this category will remain read-only, although you are welcome to create threads in other categories like Meta to discuss and/or react to those posts.
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Run potentially sensitive communications by each other
We don’t want to undermine our trust and working relationship with one another. Keep in mind, though, that this doesn’t necessarily mean we will require every single public message to be individually approved. For example, we may delegate a member to speak on our behalf on any given matter or domain if we trust them to faithfully represent us (which is one reason why we don’t want to undermine our trust and working relationship).
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We are interested in leveraging our communities current teams structure. Expect another post on this to kick off discussing between the steering committee and each team soon.
Internal processes
This part is mostly for our benefit, but for those who are curious, we are organizing ourselves internally by:
- creating a private stream for ourselves to discuss our agenda at nixpkgs.zulipchat.com
- (initially) running weekly video calls
Conclusion and next steps
We have started our collaboration, and we are evolving the way we work. In practice, committees like this can’t just go ahead and tick off agenda items right away, but we have already made a few small decisions which we’ll communicate shortly.
We will also conclude by saying that we may change our mind regarding our processes, as we learn what works and what doesn’t. This is the first Nix Steering Committee, so there’s a lot to learn and explore.