NixOS Foundation Board Meeting Minutes – 2024-02-27

Agenda:

  • [ED] STF funds
  • [RE] Board observer nomination (Janik)
  • [TH] Starknet donations
  • [RE] NixCon

Notes:

STF funds

  • 80k€ still in the foundation account
    • Most of it because people didn’t claim their money yet
    • Annoying because might lead us to need to pay taxes
    • @raitobezarius will talk with Valentin about that, making sure that it gets processed

Async work:

Moving forward we will do a Quick recap > more focused discussion

Board observer nomination of Janik (self)

  • Janik offered to become a board observer
  • Had many discussions with @RaitoBezarius on board organization, enthusiastic.
  • No established framework yet for new admissions
  • Either talk to Janik and see what we can do to provide more info on the board (lightweight initiative) or he can get more involved in board led projects
  • Just want to make sure we don’t have a stack of people self nominating and Want to set up formal process preferably
    • Invite certain people into discussing a topic, so they can open conversation to communicate directly with the board?
      • Weird to be invited for only 10 mins then bye?
  • What board size do we want?
    • Ideally 5–7 people including the observers
  • TODO: set up meeting with Janik and other board members to discuss

Starknet donations

  • Topic was raised, and we looked into it Starknet Cryptocurrency "contributions" - #27 by Atemu
  • Concerns: taxable risk, reputation risk, security of the community and misalignment of values, US person can’t receive money, how would we transfer, back and forth etc. unexpected crash possibility
  • Ryan - reach out to people and have them decide. Choice to donate or not. Maybe try to talk to other people but not make it official
  • Agreement not to have the foundation involved

NixCon North America

  • Getting exciting, larger sign-ups than initially expected
  • Board to get together if any details moving forward

Sub-team discussion for today:

  • Team funding/fundraising
  • Nix Governance

Nix governance track

@Jonas @Théophane @Eelco

  • Silvan “declarative org” proposal
    • Jonas started mapping all the GH resources to terraform to make admin easier
    • Silvan had a proposal for more transparency
    • Why not just use the website instead of adding yet another source of truth?
      • The goal is to have this be mechanically the source of truth (as in: GitHub teams and perms would be defined from that repo). So would be up-to-date by design.
    • Who would have access to that repo?
      • Only org owners for the time being
      • Potentially using CODEOWNERS or similar to delegate sub accesses
  • Defining what it means to be a team
    • Infra team reboot:
      • The infra team go a huge reboot thanks a few new people joining it
      • @raitobezarius gave a few names to Jonas who onboarded them and gave them access
      • Potential model of a successful team bootstrap
    • Eng-goal: transparency, people know how to reach-out to teams
    • How do we get there?
      • Small steps.
      • Possible first steps: look at the teams pages and fill in the missing information
        • Most established teams have some process in place for reaching out to them, getting up-to-date with the activities, etc. But every time different, and not always easy to discover.
      • Get more coherence in how the meeting notes are published?
        • Most teams share their meeting notes, but always differently (dedicated discourse category, comments in a discourse thread, committed in a repo, etc.)
        • Need to align on that?
  • Next steps:
    • Finish the declarative repo (@Jonas)
    • Define what the team pages (README) should contain as info and align them (@Théophane)

Fundraising track

@Ron @RaitoBezarius

Met on the fundraising proposal.

We touched base on the previous P0s:

  • Target donation amount: aiming for 100K, expecting at least 25K
  • we defined the largest recurring expenses in scope as: storage & build capacity (some figures above), content distribution is out of scope as the quote would be too large for us to deal with.
  • We discussed our target audience: companies, grants & institutions, individuals. We will rather focus on the first two types for the time being, but the third type is obviously welcome. We discussed a bit about NLnet and seeking more relationship in exchange for large grants, à la Summer of Nix.
  • We discussed the structure of the donations, that is: what companies expect to get in exchange for donating to Nix? Companies build on the top of Nix and have a desire to build on healthy bases, this is the opportunity we offer them via fundraising. We go further and discuss that while donating to Nix and getting in exchange working Nix/Nixpkgs/etc./an ecosystem of people to hire, we probably need to do ‘a handshake’ with them, that is: acknowledge their significant / highed tiered donation in a way that does not cost us a lot, e.g. putting a logo on a website.
  • As we were running out of time, we concluded that our next big items are: (a) how to deal with situations such as external donors. Structure the donation in a way that is acceptable with the community, etc. (b) fund utilization description, we would like to have a clear view of what we would do if we had mroe funds so that we can easily pitch it to anyone, e.g. NixCon, prospects, etc. Companies/institutions gets a clear idea of what they get to gain if they chip in today. We will work on the fund utilization proposal that I will try to submit here asynchronously for everyone to see, Ron suggested that it would be ideal to have it ready by NixCon NA for the State of Union so we could talk about it, obviously, we can talk about broader things if we don’t agree to the exact details but we can start putting the idea about formalized fundraising in the mind of everyone.
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Sounds like it was a productive meeting! Thanks for the updates

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