NixOS Foundation Board Meeting Minutes - February 14, 2023

Meta NixOS Foundation
1

With all the events throughout February below is a slightly longer post of meeting minutes.

Agenda

  • Expanding Board Observership
  • Github Collaboration
  • Metrics
  • Fosdem
  • Increasing Nix Presence - Other Events
  • Nix 20th
  • Nix Trademark
  • Nix Grants & Funding Program
  • Budget & Transparency
  • Hiring Roles - Admin / NixOS Foundation Support
  • NixCon

Meeting Notes

Expanding Board & Observership

  • @zimbatm joins the NixOS Board as observer

Github Collaboration

Metrics

  • Conducted metrics call to review the current state
  • Created overview of all metrics → looking at ways to make this public/on website
  • Discussed main ways we would like to utilize metrics
  • Need someone/mechanism to own metric space more continuously

Fosdem

  • Nix DevRoom!
  • Review how we can support in trying to get a larger room for next year
  • Suggestion to create a Fosdem summary with all the talks and publish it across official Nix channels
  • Follow up on outreach from the European Commision open source programme office

Increasing Nix Presence - Other Events

  • Nix booth and tables at State of Open Con 2023 and Scale 2023
  • Find ways to bring Nix to more events globally together

Nix 20th

  • NixOS Foundation to release funding form for meetups/events for Nix 20th and beyond
  • Working on community 20 years of Nix post

Nix Trademark

  • Board reviewing vendors and strategy
  • Received initial quotes
  • Create Nix trademark policy and post to website

Nix Grants & Funding Program

  • Homepage pull request done
  • Need to add design
  • Policy in place and ready to launch

Budget & Financials Transparency

  • NixOS Board Treasury working on reviewing last 3 years of financial statements to create a long term budget plan (part of enabling the funding/grant program)
  • Working on making financials transparent to all
  • Enable foundation to allocate more funds to community efforts
  • NixOS Foundation applied and approved for “One Stop Shop” - Enables fiscal hosting for events like NixCon

Hiring Roles - Admin / NixOS Foundation Support

  • Reviewed and approved proposal to potentially hire a NixOS Foundation Support role → This will be based on our ability to raise funds
  • Discussing creating a more focused effort to bring sponsorship and donations in general

NixCon

  • Planning and preparations are in process
  • There is a bi-weekly meeting
  • NixCon team working on more granular budget
10 Likes
2

Thanks, Ron,

So now it’s official, I have been asked to join the board as an observer :sweat_smile: Since I accepted the role, I wanted to leave a note here to share some ideas and to keep myself accountable. Here are some things that I have in mind for it:

  1. The Foundation should be in service to the community first. How can we better serve you?
  2. The Foundation can act as a bridge to the commercial world. How can we allow every company to participate on an equal footing?
  3. Everybody on the board is part of a company (including me). Can we bring people with different perspectives, for example, somebody from the academic world?

There is a lot more to do but those are the guiding principles. I’m giving myself 6 months to answer those questions.

Please talk to me. My DMs are open on Discourse, Matrix (@jonas:numtide.com) or Twitter (@zimbatm).

15 Likes
3

Thank you, @ron. Here is the accepted proposal for a NixOS Foundation support role:

Proposal for a paid support role for the NixOS Foundation

By Valentin (@fricklerhandwerk), Dawn (@mightyiam), and Matthias (@mat)

Background

In the past years, we, the authors of this proposal, have been involved with multiple activities across the Nix ecosystem.

Matthias Meschede (Tweag) brought together numerous proponents of Nix – and open source software in general – from industry, politics, and science, and organised Summer of Nix 2021 and 2022. He also helped with the organisation of NixCon 2022.

Valentin Gagarin (Tweag) founded the Nix documentation team, was involved with the new NixOS Foundation board by helping to formulate announcements and making various suggestions, and currently works as part of the Nix team of maintainers.

Shahar “Dawn” Or (self-employed) was contracted to facilitate mob programming in Summer of Nix 2022. He also initiated and led the regular work sessions which led to this proposal.

In these sessions we strove to understand how we could best serve the community. We’ve found that while the NixOS Foundation board is capable of making strategic decisions, it clearly lacks the capacity to execute on them. We saw helping to rectify this deficiency as the most impactful contribution we could make. And we have reached the conclusion that an additional role is required to provide that capacity. Which brings us to this proposal.

Role description

This role reports to and consults with the NixOS Foundation board. Its objective is to empower community teams and foster their ability to facilitate contributions – even large ones. This is to be accomplished by helping teams in establishing workflows that are pleasant, effective, and predictable. It will partake in formalising various roles and processes as well as in facilitating the necessary communication.

We envision the following key results over the course of a year, details of which are subject to approval of the board:

  1. Key ecosystem roles are defined and filled, and succession is ensured.
  2. Each role’s essential decision-making processes are documented.
  3. A transparent and accessible funding and spending lifecycle for activities in the ecosystem is in place.

We imagine the key results to be realised through these measures and activities:

  1. Directly assist the board in their activities:
    1. Gather and maintain information to help with decisions
    2. Draft proposals
    3. Conduct outward communication with the community and external actors
  2. Keep in touch with all the teams, including the board, to help them to
    1. Specify and adhere to their priorities
    2. Establish accountability towards the community
    3. Set objectives and roadmaps
    4. Make their workflows explicit
    5. Identify needs and bottlenecks
    6. Define and assign responsibilities
    7. Find more long-term maintainers and contributors
    8. Track progress
    9. Increase visibility of their work
  3. Facilitate communication across stakeholders, such as
    1. The NixOS Foundation board
    2. Community team leads
    3. Maintainers and contributors
    4. Organisations using Nix
  4. Help setting up new teams or work groups as needed
  5. Regularly publish activity reports

Explicit non-goals of this role

  1. Making decisions for other roles or teams
  2. Setting team agendas
  3. General fundraising
  4. Performing recurrent shallow-context tasks

Role requirements

  1. Well known and trusted member of the Nix community
  2. Reasonable familiarity with the relevant technologies
  3. High proficiency in written and oral communication in English, and excellent collaboration skills
  4. Transparency and accountability compatible with the degree of public exposure associated with this role

The process to select an applicant

  1. We will formulate a call for applications to meet your approval.
  2. The board will publish it.
  3. One month later the call will be closed.
  4. Within two board meetings, a candidate will be selected and an announcement published.

Next steps

In order to begin work, we ask the NixOS Foundation board to

  1. Publicly approve the envisioned role and the planned activities
  2. Support the fundraising process by participating in encounters with potential sponsors
  3. Publish an open call to fill the role with a well-known member of the community

Now that the proposal has been accepted, we will proceed with raising funds for the role.

By the way, if you’d like to participate in these work sessions, please message me. The schedule is Tuesdays and Thursdays 08:00 UTC for one hour.

6 Likes
4

@mightyiam , I would like to join your your work sessions to see if I can contribute. If you are OK with that, would you please send me the meeting link ? Thank you.

2 Likes
5

If you’d like a Google Calendar invite, PM me an email address.