Following up on open board call from March 14th
Only written notes for this call as asked by Ryan Lahfa such that every attendee can speak freely.
Topics:
1. Sponsorship Policy
- ryan:
- it would be important if everyone takes a look at piegames propsal because it will be the main point of discussion (see above)
- ryan:
- asks that the goal of this meeting will be agreeing on the specific policy vs. establishing a process to come up with new policies
- goal should be: adopt it as is, finetune later
- janik:
- nixcon eu meetings were started; they decided to use piegames draft proposal for sponsorship organization (for now)
- ron:
- showing the meeting notes and proposal on discourse as next action point
- piegames walks us through the idea of their proposal:
- intention for the policy is to prevent future incidents resulting from sponsorships, e.g. PR fallouts, human labor cost
- streamline the process to catch most eventualities
- different proposals would be acceptable, as long as they cover these points
- tomberek open questions:
- what is the group that makes this decision (selection committee members)
- who are the members, and what are their decision processes?
- how does disclosure of rejected sponsorships work?
- what is the group that makes this decision (selection committee members)
- piegames: clarification request about rejected application requests
- tomberek: (I didn’t understand this | me neither)
- theophane: on a case-by-case basis
- theophane: clarify whether applications should be public
- more community involvement, but risk that it blows up early
- risk to the company, when they decide to apply
- tomberek:
- what does publishing it mean? social media? team internally?
- ryan: this is already in the finetuning area of the proposal
- process should be up to the selection committee, empower them!
- we only need to come up with a way of instantiating the selction commitee
- kiara: foundation goal “to support the nix ecosystems infrastructure and … functional deployment model”
- sponsorship decision seemed to be in line with this goal
- uproar in the community, because the goal is apparently not in line with the community expectations for what the foundation should do
- tomberek:
- need to agree on goals, everything else derives from that, full agreement with kiara
- ryan:
- fears scope creep, suggests trying to later address these things that are not setting up a (temporary) sponsorship policy
- theophane:
- likes about the current proposals, that they focus on the mechanisms, not on content further things can be discussed in parallel
- ron:
- critical item is discussing the committee, what will that look like?
- can we make this as reproducible as possible? can we generate something that in the same situation will lead to the same decision, assuming nothing changes on the sponsors side (aura of professional ecosystem, giving the sponsors the possibility to predict whether they will be accepted next time)
- critical item is discussing the committee, what will that look like?
- ryan asks for stakeholder opinions
- moderation team
- piegames (wrote the proposal)
- foundation board
- tomberek for marketing:
- authority-responsibility dynamic
- if responsibility about cleaning up messes or implementation, then reasonable to hand them authority to do so
- who will decide?
- individual people? team leads?
- authority-responsibility dynamic
- jonas
- pick team leads and decide that’s the commitee
- [tomberek]: this is a reasonable Schelling point
- janik
- disagrees on that idea, not everybody is a stakeholder
- piegames
- what is the exact role of the seletion committee
- wouldn’t want to be involved with finding sponsors, just being in the loop to make sure everything works out fine
- overseeing the task and result
- which teams? four teams, which have been named a couple of time now:
- orga
- board
- marketing
- moderation
- decision making process decided internally?
- ryan: sponsor finding is task for the organizer
- committee only for selecting/vetting
- tomberek: sponsorship managed by responsible person from event orga
- role has value, so it’s not the responsibility of the entire team
- common point of contact
- ryan: “sponsorship chair”
- committee only an internal role,
- committee chair part of the event orga
- thinks this is not necessarily part of the scope
- theophane:
- four team proposed, asks if anyone has a reason to want to add to or remove from teams that list
- ryan:
- recommends that commitee members should be representative of the community as a whole
- does not want to introduce a restriction on teams
- perhaps include single persons from community who have shown involvement, perhaps have more energy etc.
- tomberek: more different teams leads to more diversity
- jonas: if we could build shared understanding of our brand, would create a sanction(?) mechanism, most of the time this procedure should be non-contentious
- tomberek agrees
- theophane: is it problematic to the moderation team to take “political” decisions, because they’re consistently under fire anyway
- hexa: thinks that wouldn’t meaningfully change anything about the situation we find ourself in
- piegames: lazy consensus: ask many people without being blocked on that
- ASF Glossary | Apache Software Foundation
- about moderation team: justification would be mainly from community pov; would be justifiable and not much of an issue
- tomberek:
- says that lazy consensus was what we did, resulted in contention
- ryan:
- lazy consensus but with minimum participation, laziness shall not cause issues later on
- asks to progress towards action / take decision about the policy and do fine-tuning later
- [tomberek]: the point of lazy concensuss is precisely to determine what to do when there is no participation
- piegames:
- towards tombereks remark: not enough propagation, not enough people involved, that’s why it should be done in public (proposal)
- gather feedback from the community
- jonas:
- concern: relationship with companies, credibility, people who reject a company should do that with this concern in mind
- ryan:
- the board is responsible to mediate between the possible sponsors and the selection commitee
- jonas:
- if decisions tie our hands, that makes the overall funding situation more difficult
- stabilize the policy in person at next nixcon
- jonas:
- organizers → selection commitee → foundation
- ryan: two ways of going about this:
- board decides until next meeting
- agree now
- eelco:
- thinks that there’s no agreement
- tomberek says he objects upon ryan asking
- put in a proposal fixes up some of the legal risk in it
- hopes that it is closer to what was discussed internally (where?)
- ryan asks if tomberek still has objections after fixing the wording
- tomberek there is not much difference in procedural things, tries to include more ACM style things
- scope and processing rules are what piegames problems
- has problem about the point that we are providing significant benefit, that this is advertising or endorsement
- should not formalize/write down something that later becomes a problem
- tomberek proposed an adjustment: [policy proposal]: Sponsorship · Issue #110 · NixOS/foundation · GitHub
- jonas: board can take this into account
- have to make sure we don’t stay away from the spirit
- there is agreement and spirit, and then there is the legality
- decision makers should overall represent the community
- eelco: wants to see the final exact statements that will be proposed
- eelco: toms proposal looks good to me
- depends on what it exactly ends up looking
- that’s the reason parliaments have second readings for that
- ryan: board can make a statement that there’s an intent to look at piegames policy
- can be modified by the community between piegames, tomberek and other contributors
- submit final proposal to the board to consider for acceptance
- ron:
- emphasises that the commitee must make reproducible decisions
- janik:
- most people only cared about (this) one sponsor and (this) one industry, so it sohuld be trivial to get reproducability for everyone else not in that industry
- ryan:
- concern is valid and it is important to keep it in mind
- to theohpane, eelco: are you in agreement with the principle?
- theophane
- on board with agreeing on the principle
- ryan:
- core idea = piegames policiy proposal with toms modifications
- eelco
- agrees on the core ideas of piegames proposal with adjustments by tomberek
- seem quite fake: point 5.3, insert rest of some discourse comment, which talks specifically about some company
- understands that is not gonna end up in the final thing, but part of why he doesn’t want to say he agrees with it
- ryan concludes that with all board members agreeing on the intention there’s a way forward
- does anyone have any concerns to raise about the core proposal?
- graham:
- has significant hesitations about a policy that isn’t driven from principles set by the overall project leadership in a long term durable way, hasn’t read either policy so maybe it isn’t relevant.
- ryan:
- graham should formulate objections on the issue tracker, because their concern does contain few actionable things
- graham:
- concerned that deciding that a community member (like Anduril) can’t be present at the conference is a significant mistake.
- ryan:
- if you have that strong an objection to the policy voice your concrete objections on the issue in the next 24-48 hours
- jonas:
- anduril can still participate in the community, but we don’t want them as sponsorship
- anduril employees should still be able to participate in the community
- ryan:
- proposes that these issues should be formulated in the issue tracker
- eelco:
- about just excluding anduril from sponsorship, but not excluding otherwise
- if we start excluding companies in one way, it won’t stop there
- why would you accept their code, but not their money
- it also won’t stop with the defense industry
- piegames interjects that we are past that discussion since all points have been laid out
- eelco:
- decision about what kind of project we want to be
- hobbyist project: then we can exclude any company we like
- professional projects can’t really do that
- ryan:
- we cannot continue changing the current trajectory
- this is the first time anduril would be considered a community member
- theophane:
- policy as stated does not by principle rule out anything
- quite likely to rule out anduril, because of what it entails, but it is not explicitly stated in the policy
- this is a matter for the commitee to decide
- graham:
- wishes the foundation would have a perspective, instead of continuously putting it down on an amorphous community who has no mechanism for determining membership or voting
- ryan:
- interesting observation which goes beyond the scope of this call
- recommendation: solve this after deciding on a temporary policy
- graham:
- especially when evidently significant participants may be suddenly finding themselves as not co suffered members of the community(?)
- janik:
- we don’t have to accept everyone as a sponsor to be a professional project.
- ryan:
- voices reasonable concerns, but better packaged as a comment on the issue
- mica:
- I feel like the board/foundation should push as much decision making down to the organizers or the conference
- tomberek:
- most of the proposal is a combination of the Apache and ACM precedence + procedures
- ryan:
- do we have concerns? objections?
- closes the call
- next call in two weeks
- ron does not want to delay, can move it up
- hoping for all opinions, we have to get better, don’t wait until the last two minutes to voice them
- this is really about progress, the policy can change in a year or two, what is ideal is to come togehter to roll forward
- there are so many problems, that are required to make our community successful, and i’d like to work on them as well
– let’s go forward and spend time on other things by coming to a conclusion timely
- ryan: we can schedule a call for next week
— The call ended here
2. Nix and External Entity Relationship - (Add link to all notes/discussions that started in NixCon Darmstadt)
- NixCon 2023 Sponsorship Situation from the NixOS Foundation
- NixCon NA 2024 is getting sponsored by Anduril, what to do about it