After successfully using CIVS to tally the 450 ballots cast (56% turnout) on OpaVote, We are hereby concluding this election! We congratulate the first members of the Nix Steering Committee (SC) (ordered alphabetically):
For verification purposes, all OpaVote ballots will soon be available here (the result there should be ignored; voters will also get an email), while the CIVS tally to determine the result using the same ballots is already available here. See the new docs for more info on result verification.
We are now establishing communications with the first SC members and will soon make a final handover announcement on behalf of the EC / NCA.
We, the members of the EC / NCA, and @ron from the NixOS Foundation board, are thankful for everybody’s participation in this first election, and are looking forward to see the first SC getting started.
i just started with nix a few days ago and love it! Than I read that there was massive problems in the community. I really hope this is the beginning of a new positive phase! All the best!
Congratulations to the winners! Many thanks to the election committee/constitutional assembly. It’s great that we have such a high turnout for the first election, especially considering that a year ago we did not have a constitution, or elections, let alone any experience with this process!
Looking at the ballots (https://opavote.com/ballots/6251213851459584/0), I see a concerning number of ballots who only vote for one person (or their top three or top five). Of course this can be a valid way to vote, however I wonder how many of these are because of a misunderstanding on how the voting system works (or a confusion in the UI).
Moreover, I do find the ballot counting page and the various methods of counting confusing and a bit intransparent (or at least, intractable). So, after having tried it out in practice, I’d like to revisit Gabriella’s proposal to switch to the much more simple approval voting for next year.
I personally only voted for candidates that I knew after reading through their qna. After reading through I had less than 7 candidates to vote for so I voted as much.
I find this a better approach that we are even allowed to only cast ballots for people we agree with.
Moreover, I do find the ballot counting page and the various methods of counting confusing and a bit intransparent (or at least, intractable). So, after having tried it out in practice, I’d like to revisit Gabriella’s proposal to switch to the much more simple approval voting for next year.
Not the place to discuss this at length (unfortunately the issue linked by @piegames is no longer open for discussion), so I’ll just mention here for reference to those concerned about the voting system, that the mathematicians who designed the Majority Judgment (presenting it as a “theory and method of voting, judging and ranking, shown to be superior to all other known methods”, see a previous discussion about it there: Nix Community Survey 2023 - #10 by julm) published a paper in 2018 titled “Majority Judgment vs. Approval Voting” whose introduction states that:
While some AV [Approval Voting] supporters admit that MJ [Majority Judgment] allows “more nuanced judgments” [11] they steadfastly maintain that AV is superior, advancing a variety of reasons.
The first intent of this article is to present practical and theoretical evidence to show that every one of those “reasons” is either wrong, insignificant, and/or not realized in practice (and some, amusingly, are shared with AV).
[…] The second intent of the article is to show that two grades are too few (however AV is viewed). Two obviously permits no nuance in the expression of voters’ opinions, in and of itself this is sufficiently damning. AV’s behavior also shows that two is too few. It is proven that with MJ the no-show paradox—extremely unlikely in practice with three or more grades—cannot occur when there are three grades, so overcomes all the AV-enthusiasts’ criticisms.
In general, it is argued, majority judgment is a significantly better replacement for majority rule than approval voting has pretended to be.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to the organizers for this! It’s been quite the ride getting here. I hope this marks the beginning of a more steady path of iterative, small but steady improvements, both on the social and the technical level.
Edit: if I see this correctly we have 3 people from the core Nix C++ team on the committee. That is a very good sign for a focus on core technical issues, I hope.
There is room for improvement on turnout, sure, but I think we should be proud of the turnout we got.
Let’s look at Debian as a reference. Their 2024 leadership election had 1010 developers eligible to vote and they had 369 valid ballots cast. That’s 37 % turnout. At least that’s my reading of this page on that election: https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/vote_001
We reached out to people who interacted with the project at some point in the last 4 years, who may have moved on, missed the message, or simply not cared, to take the time and vote on something that did not exist a year ago. I think we should see getting the majority of the electorate to vote in that situation as a win.
I am part of an association which does their board election like this and the first time I also didn’t get how the voting was and we explain it every time at least two times and we generally always have someone who didn’t get it but we always agree that the alternatives like having only one vote or only up to three votes is also not what we want.
I think the best is to work with examples which illustrate what is possible and what isn’t.
Congratulations to the new Steering Committee and the Constitutional Assembly for successfully running the first election! No matter our other disagreements, we should all celebrate the victory of turning governance into an institution that is well-defined, responsible to the community, and (hopefully) stable with clear rules for transfer of power.
Speaking for myself:
I found it odd to vote for 23 people ranked;
I had a group ranked in my mind after reading the material and ranked them leaving the rest unranked.
Grateful for the time and effort both the election committee and the steering committee-elect members have and will put into this initiative. Thank you all
