# NixCon Governance Workshop

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixcon-governance-workshop/32705
**Category:** Announcements
**Created:** [September 7, 2023, 12:46am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixcon-governance-workshop/32705 "2023-09-07T00:46:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 18

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### Author: ![fricklerhandwerk](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/fricklerhandwerk/32/2029_2.png) [@fricklerhandwerk](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/fricklerhandwerk)
#### Post date: [October 26, 2023, 8:42am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixcon-governance-workshop/32705/18 "2023-10-26T08:42:45Z")

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> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> Considering making hydra a second tier project even makes me wonder again where priorities are.

That was an example idea from before the public discussion, which clearly indicates we should somehow pick up maintenance again. But really my intention was to reflect current reality, as @colemickens pointed out.

> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> And also, what would it mean for the projects being labeled “official” or “third party”? Is it just the position on some website? Would there be any requirements for the maintainers to be met?

It should be both, in my opinion, as the idea is to signal to users and contributors what to expect in terms of code quality, support, and maintenance activity.

> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> Are ownership transfers required?

This was never brought up as far as I know, and I wouldn’t know why. If someone wrote code is maintaining it, and the proposed working group wants to elevate that project in status, the first step would be asking the code owner if they’re interested in that kind of attention. More visibility often translates to more support requests and contributions to handle.

> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> What happens when a project gets demoted again?

I think that should simply amount to finding a place for it to live, and that would depend on whether someone is still maintaining it at all.

> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> Will an official project receive any benefits like free hydra time, or some money from the foundation?

Benefits would make a lot of sense given that so far more official status only adds responsibilities, and compute time on community infrastructure seems a very reasonable one. I’d support some kind of material benefits as well, and while direct funding through the foundation is probably a long shot at this moment, we could take an example from how the NGI Zero consortium supports their projects with various services to raise overall product quality and success probability. We’ve already been experimenting with and discussed more direct support with grant applications, as a concrete example.

> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> “widely agreed upon” does mean what exactly? Who is asked here?

This is a subjective statement of course, but for me it’s things where there’s no evidence of someone involved objecting to the current course taken.

> [@NobbZ](#):
>
> Would recognition or agreement of the “not widely agreed upon” things change if they were advertised more aggressively?

There’s potential for some shifts, and I’d appreciate if there was higher probability that active community members had a higher chance to be aware of all the things they would care about. But I don’t think advertisement would make a substantial difference, because the number of people we’d consider stakeholders will still be limited. The real problem is that for many issues we don’t have a clear definition of who should be asked, and no boundary who should be listened to, so there is always uncertainty, which I think sometimes leads to decisions not being taken although they could be.

> [@colemickens](#):
>
> Separate, but relatedly, I think going with “tiers” of support might be better than “third-party” which is more of a term I think of when I think of projects that are primarily “owned” by external organizations to the “nix community” at large. I perceive Hydra as being a “community property” though not necessarily actively developed the way nixpkgs, nixos, etc are.

Yes, the terminology needs a bit more clarification. Ownership and support are orthogonal concepts, and we need measurable definitions for both in order to set realistic expectations.

Right now there are the NixOS and nix-community GitHub organisations, which are already well-known and are already the best approximation we have to what’s really going on in terms of ownership and support. All I’d like to do is improve that approximation in order to reduce the time and effort required to make best use of the Nix ecosystem and participate in its development effectively.

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