NixOS Foundation Board Meeting Minutes - February 14, 2023

Meta NixOS Foundation
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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.

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