NixOS Board Meeting Minutes - July 1, 2022
Key Items
- NixOS First Open Video Call
- Short Board Meeting due to Open Call
- Non-profit legalities
Meeting Notes from Open Video Call
The NixOS Board held the first “Open Call” last week. We plan to make this a standard practice that happens recurrently. The goal is to have an open forum for discussion, questions, feedback and comments.
Joined → Linus Heckemann, Robert Hensing, Artturin, Asymmetric, Nick Bathum
What are your expectations from the foundation?
- Identify the long-standing issues in the community and empower people/community to solve them. Have the foundation enable that.
Questions asked or comments by community members:
- Can you clarify the role of the board observer?
- The role is primarily a way to keep the rule that there should be no more than one board member for each company and have Graham on board (because he is a trusted member of the community, but both he and Eelco work for Determinate Systems). That position might be expanded in the future, although there is no clear plan yet. The term is a relatively common one in a board setup. The role is primarily one of an advisor, with no formal power but involved in all the discussions.
- Is it a paid engagement to be on the board?
- No (although expenses can be reimbursed). The statutes forbid this anyways.
- Board members should present themselves, their involvement, background, and who they are. They should have their names/backgrounds/experiences on the foundation page.
- We plan to do this once the new board is formally appointed.
- Can you clarify the board’s stand and vision regarding NixCons?
- The foundation has not been too involved in the past (mostly to avoid some potential legal and financial complications). But it should do more on that front. The goal is to empower a NixCon team or local events organizers by providing them the support they need. The foundation’s role here should stay a supporting role; it is not its job to organize anything by itself. As we see NixCon as critical we want to make sure it is empowered to happen every year.
- Are we working out a way to build a process for non-board members to become members of the foundation? I want to see that the foundation isn’t just a consortium of companies.
- We haven’t made it a priority yet. The bootstrap process was already complex enough, and many issues must be solved. But rules will have to be set eventually. In general, the board’s job is not to decide anything, but it’s the one accountable for everything.
- You guys are definitely heading in the right direction and looking forward to seeing things take effect.
- Currently, it is unclear who has access to the infrastructure, so teams would be good.
- A big goal of the board is to build more intentionality around the team structure. Amongst other things, we’ll probably want to distinguish between Community and Critical teams. Community team: Group of people working on a specific topic to improve the state of the world. The team can stop working for a couple of weeks or even more without significantly impacting the community. Critical team: Team that’s vital to the community (like the infra team) and needs more attention, support, and accountability.
Feedback Requests
We would love to hear the community’s thoughts on a few of the following items.
- Platform for open video calls. We are considering different options to use in the future.
- Open video call cadence: quarterly?
- Recording the calls and sharing them. We will share meeting notes regardless of whether the call is recorded or not.