I singled out the quote, because there was a long line of “this subset of the community, not based on stake in the community or prudent role, but rather by their gender minority status alone, are given additional representation”.
I would say the portions about having different organizations within the NixOS Ecosystem having representation makes sense, as they are either NixOS or event related. I’m less convinced that having seats for groups that are not “first priority is the success of Nix”, but rather “first priority is the success of your faction” is a mis-aligned incentive model for a software project. We are not a national government trying to give voices to every constituent, we are the Nix community. There will always be a revolving door of people increasing their activity with Nix and others who are decreasing their participation with Nix. In theory, most demographics should have representation assuming equal opportunity.
For people about to say, “there’s likely to be no representation of a minority group”, let’s do some math. Assuming equal distribution of individuals (yes, this doesn’t reflect reality, please just entertain me) there’s a minority group that represents 10% of the Nix community. In the “5 seat proposal”, there’s currently at least 17 people being represented: 4 board members, 2+ PLs, 5 moderation members, 6 marketing memebers. 1-(1-.1)^17
is a 83.3%
chance that there will be 1 or more of those members on any of the teams. For a 20%
minority, that’s a 97.7%
likelihood that there will be 1 or more members involved.
What I’m trying to say is, people should be encouraged to participate. If we provide the structure for equality of opportunity, then the demographics within the community should be reflected in who fills a given position across time. We shouldn’t be going out of our way to discriminate based on age, sex, race, sexual identity, or disability. This growing factionalism within the community causes me a lot anxiety.