Nix Steering Committee vote of no confidence

33 Likes

Sad it has come to this really.

Franz stepping down early leading to this vote failing is such an unfortunate chain of events. This now means that most likely the SC doesn’t get fully reelected and a lot of community wouldn’t have any trust in them (me included)

7 Likes

I’m a new contributor, and this is my first election. I’m not aligned with any current or former SC members. I’ve heard about the MIC controversies but wasn’t involved enough to form an informed view. Speaking broadly:

Staggered elections exist to provide stability and continuity, and to prevent hostile takeovers. They allow the SC to pursue difficult or controversial measures without being swayed by every passing controversy. If we call for a clean slate whenever there’s uproar, we undermine the very purpose of staggering.

It’s unfortunate that most of the moderation team chose to leave without a succession plan. At the very least, I hope we preserve continuity within the SC. (And while the petition urging remaining SC members to resign carries an impressive list of signatures, that does not necessarily represent the electorate’s long-term opinion - either now or a year from now.)

15 Likes

if somebody ran on a platform of ā€œif elected i’ll force a vote of permanently disbanding the SC (and vote in favor of said action), and in the case such vote fails will pass my role onto the runner-upā€, i would vote for them.

not knowledgeable enough about the SC/constitution/etc to know if/how precisely that platform can be enacted, and that’s maybe half the point. last year i voted for the SC defensively. i was afraid that if actors with opposing views to my own got the role, they would force their views and enough of the community would view that as legitimate so as to go along with it (because in a democracy, majority makes right; it’s ā€œwhat The People asked forā€). if enough members are voting defensively like that, the success case is a body that never meaningfully acts – but at the cost that every member concerned about misuses of power has to engage in this process for 10 hours each year to ensure that success case.

setting aside the actual things SC does (in theory or in practice), the form and process is a net drag on the entire community.

2 Likes

If your position is that the electorate should get what it wants, then a re-election would be the best way to achieve that. If enough of the electorate still wants Robert and John on the SC, they can be voted back in. If not, then the electorate values change over continuity, and don’t you think that should be honored?

8 Likes

Long term, yes. But my position is narrower: the electorate is entitled to participate in elections conducted under the governing document (ā€œconstitutionā€). It is not entitled to elections outside that framework.

That doesn’t preclude community members from respectfully petitioning the SC to resign, calling a vote of no confidence, or taking other legitimate actions. Whether such moves ultimately help the project is unclear to me, but I respect the - respectful - engagement.

I believe the community could benefit from learning how to function in a system where immediate policy change cannot be forced through in a single election cycle but requires work through elected representatives over a period of time. Yes, it may mean lowering your expectations. But also, hopefully, less drama. (Staggered elections are meant to slow policy change down.)


When replying, please consider that while we may disagree on the best path forward, I have no ill will towards anyone (so farā„ļø?) And please excuse my ignorance stemming from the relatively short time I had the pleasure working with the community.

9 Likes

I appreciate the clarification, and certainly find the second quote easier to agree with than the first.

I too am unsure about the best way to help the project, but I think the spirit of the constitution is best served when the SC is representative of the viewpoints within the community. Without a full re-election, the SC will start with two members of the ā€˜this is fine’ faction (based on their reported votes) and five new members. The election process is designed to elect members in proportion to the electorate, so if the community is 60% ā€˜this is not fine’ and 40% ā€˜this is fine’, we will end up electing two new ā€˜this is fine’ members, for a total of 4/7, giving ā€˜this is fine’ an unrepresentative majority on the SC, despite being in the minority in the community at large.

Ideally, the numerical analysis wouldn’t be relevant, because ideally the ā€˜this is fine’–leaning members would take the cue from the community and change their viewpoint — and votes — to ā€˜maybe not so fine, huh?’ An easy way to signal that they would do that, of course, is to offer themselves up for re-election; and their reluctance to do so suggests otherwise. So we’re dealing with the non-ideal, but not exactly novel, case of humans falling back to factionalism and holding on to power, justifying the numerical analysis.

It’s up to you whether it is more important to have continuity or proportional representation. Personally, I lean towards the latter, though I’m sure we both wish we could have both. (And, in the case of a re-election, we can! If Robert or John or both get enough votes, then we’ll have continuity, and not at the cost of giving additional seats to the people who agree with them.)

9 Likes

Thanks for the post, it helps me to understand some more of the issue.

However, besides the constitutional amendment, I’d go even further and say that the Nix community should vote against any member of the current Nix team (which would include Tom who is currently running for re-election), since I believe they are in large part responsible for why our community now has two forks (Lix and Determinate Nix) and is losing ground against both of them.

Nix has lost a large number of contributors to these forks due to dysfunction within the Nix team and now they’ve brought that same dysfunction to the Steering Committee, which has resulted in every other member of the Steering Committee abandoning ship because we can’t do our job.

I’m a bit confused on the relevance of being a member of the Nix team.

What is the nature of the dysfunction that you mention? Poor planning? Poor communication? Poor consensus building?

Is there more I can read about this, and how the particular SC members in question relate to the dysfunction you mention?

2 Likes

our community now has two forks (Lix and Determinate Nix) and is losing ground against both of them.

I find this expression of the state of things curious. If there is an ā€œour communityā€ at all – which I’m inclined to dispute –, then the only sensible way to delineate it, would be ā€œusers of Nixpkgsā€ which clearly includes all forks as well.

I think independent implementations of Nix are a good thing for Nixpkgs since can act as checks and balances, if you will. Significant new developments for NixOS/nix in the last 5-ish years have been highly controversial (to the degree that Determinate Nix was created to ship certain features for prospective (corporate) users that could not garner wide support or have significant implementation issues). Nixpkgs has always taken a conservative approach and to this day doesn’t use anything that wasn’t in Nix 2.3.18 (though, I suppose, path interpolation syntax will become more common now, but this is a minor feature). Diverse Nix implementation will indirectly enforce that changes to the technology Nixpkgs uses need to be widely supported both in a technical and political sense.

I think the insistence that NixOS/nix should be the principal Nix implementation which ā€œour communityā€, i.e. the community, is formed and assigning blame to The Nix Team for causing ā€œour communityā€ to loose ground, is a self-delusion. A unified community is something to be earned at this point and certainly can’t be demanded by the SC. Any semblance of unity largely stems from the fact that Nixpkgs is such a vast and maintenance intensive project. A fork of Nixpkgs seems to have been to big an ask thus far and people have just been sticking it out even though they are unhappy.

The failure to recognize that there are opposing and largely incompatible visions for how the project should be run going forward (technical, organizational, social, political, …) will ensure that we are going to continue having our yearly crisis. We are not One Good SC away from magically finding common ground on all relevant issues.

24 Likes

What if it’s just normal that people do the following:

  • resign from sc i fthey need to
  • decide to stay on in sc if they elect to once they were elected to serve there (unless constitution dictates otherwise)
  • put deadlocked SC votes to community to decide (works for local and state gov in the US)
  • people could be from any company or background and should be judged on the merit of their actions, and not who employs them etc.
  • Make a way to actually do the judging on the merit of their actions in an evidence based way
  • Find a better interface for engagement from the greater community than emotional reactions in a forum where people play out tit-for-tat polarized hill-dying for fun and prizes. (I guess it’s supposed to be in the repo of Nix? Whatever). Need some formal place to propose and record things from the community, FOR consideration by steering committee or other governance entities. instead of ad hoc letter signing or whatever.

Every step, action, decision doesn’t need to be some overblown crisis. Try to remove your emotion, and find a way forward. Everyone here is human being, and has good intentions on all sides of these debates and battles. Give other people the benefit of the doubt. I mentioned a year ago that there is a huge amount of jumping to conclusions going on in these discussions. Don’t do that. Don’t jump to conclusions about people and confront them about assumptions that are not proven. Don’t operate from and act primarily on your emotion. Other people are not responsible for your own emotions.

Every single person here who has spoken, acted or contributed toward the efforts to create some kind of governance in this project holds some responsibility for the current state of things, and the outcome. The forks, the debating, all of it. If you cannot find a way to compromise with the people elected, the people in the community, and if you cannot figure out how to just afford feedback from the community, afford the positions of people elected to the governance of the community, afford democratic processes for changing and live with the results, you’ll be stuck in endless stalemate and fragmentation. There’s no all-or-nothing solution to this problem. It’s a human problem, and everyone involved would need to find ways to compromise. It’s not easy. If you hope to preserve the integrity and health of this project and community: learn how to compromise, or die.

5 Likes