Last week we opened applications for the constitutional assembly. Before nominations closed on Sunday, we received 27 applications in total. After carefully reviewing the applications, analysing community feedback, and consulting with board observers, we are hereby appointing the constitutional assembly as follows (sorted alphabetically):
- Danielle Lancashire (@endocrimes): Governance expert and long-standing contributor
- edef (@edef1c): Long-standing/specialised contributor
- lassulus (@lassulus): Long-standing contributor
- Michael Raskin (@7c6f434c): Long-standing contributor
- Ryan Trinkle (@ryantrinkle): Governance expert and long-standing contributor
- Sarah Novotny: External expert
- Silvan Mosberger (@infinisil): Long-standing contributor
This was a difficult choice, as there were a lot of strong applications. We thank everybody for their submission and want to emphasise that we value your involvement regardless of whether you’ve been selected or not.
Selection considerations
Thanks to all the valuable community discussions on Zulip, we took several aspects into account, including:
- Trust and merit: For the community roles we prioritised people that are trusted by fellow community members and have a known track record of accomplishments.
- Fitness to the values expressed in the application announcement: The selection is a group of individuals who can work together despite having different opinions, care about everyone being heard, and demonstrate the ability to listen and compromise.
- Gender representation: The selection has a mix of genders, ensuring that minorities in the community are also represented.
- Employment diversity: The selection has a mix of people that are employed/self-employed/non-employed/academic and doing Nix-related/partially Nix-related/non-Nix-related work, ensuring a variety of backgrounds.
- External viewpoint: Our external expert can provide an outside perspective, and comes with a range of experience from similar situations.
In addition, we thank everybody who gave feedback on the applications, especially with private messages, but also public reactions.
Next steps
Our board statements over the past two weeks give the assembly initial guidelines to adhere to:
- Giving power to the community (starting point)
- Starting Process and Transparent Communication (communication)
- Assembly Appointment Process (mission, lifetime and relationship with the board)
- Nix Constitutional Assembly Applications open (mission and values)
- (this post)
This is the last board statement on the community governance process. All future updates will come from the assembly instead, which will be posted to the new assembly announcements Zulip stream.
To establish an initial connection between the community and the assembly, there will be a Q&A on Zulip (in a separate stream, to be announced) soon, with an open call on 2024-05-20T19:00:00Z in https://meet.google.com/zkm-jcwr-ebi. Both assembly and board members will be there to answer questions.
Going forward, the assembly will be in charge of the Zulip instance. The constitutional assembly stream will be closed, while the governance stream will be used to gather feedback and ideas from the community. Zulip moderation will be revisited and is likely to be carried out by the assembly itself in the future.
Conclusion
This has been an intense two weeks, not everything went as smoothly as we’d hoped, but we are glad to have reached this point. We are looking forward (and hope you are too) to seeing the progress of the assembly over the next months, and wish them great success as they pave the way to a better future.
And to end with what we started with, a bit of Pieter Hintjens wisdom -
Put people before code.
Deep appreciation for everyone’s contributions to our ongoing progress.
NixOS Foundation Board