The original intent to keep a few people in the Steering committee was to keep continutity as well because 1 year is not a lot of time to build long lasting structures/processes. Yearly full rotation will make it hard to form partnerships with other groups - luckily we have other teams that can also cover for that part to some extent. Some of the frustration shared before was about not beeing able find consensus within the SC meetings. Beeing able to efficiently lead a meeting so that everyone afterwards feels like they achieved something productive is also a skill that people on the SC either have to have or need to learn.
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One thing to consider is that no one to my knowledge was payed to be on the SC.
Assuming everyone has a full time job means that everyone has a similar amount of time/energy to spend for this kind of work. The people that got voted into Nix team, however also got payed to some extend to work on Nix. After all the resignation were the attacks and not the amount of work.
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This part of the post is very strange with the context (of having read all the posts in the other heated discussions), and probably even stranger without this context.
What do you mean by āGabriella has actively turned against usā? By asking for a vote of no confidence? Until very recently, you had the opportunity to resign from your position and be a candidate to the SC again, so this doesnāt specifically seem to be against you. And from this additional context, Gabriella clearly did not make this against you (and whoever else you include in āusā).
EDIT: when posting this, I had not seen this new blog post by Gabriella (discussed here on Discourse). Perhaps thatās what roberth means by āGabriella has actively turned against usā, and perhaps by āusā he means āthe Nix core teamā.
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ā_ā
I feel like itās an inverse of what shouldāve happened ā at least for me the only issue was that your response in The Thread felt too oblique and dismissive in the context of the Anduril twitter thread. And not even specifically you resigning, just the whole SC getting re-elected.
Instead we get this. Of course itās your prerogative to react to all this in a way that works best for you ā it just feels counterproductive. Having not been part of the team I canāt really know if it was correlation or causation, but between then (before you joined the Nix team) and now it certainly feels like there had been a qualitative change in development process of the build tool. Instead of stagnating, issues were fixed, tech debt refactored and new features added. I think that things like the meson build, dynamic derivations, submodule/LFS handling or subflakes would have been languishing still, if the status quo of the contribution process didnāt change. Never mind the recent slew of new improvements in the works. And while, like I said, I canāt know for sure which it was from the outside, Iād hazard a guess it wouldnāt have been possible without you (and others) facilitating the changes. I also appreciated how you approached the contributions, for example, pushing against Eelco ā as much as I wish it had been done for ages, because copying flakes to the store has caused me so much grief already ā wanting to merge the lazy trees as-is without addressing the fundamental issues, as I agree that itās better to do things right eventually than to have a wrong thing sooner.
All in all, I think it would be a net negative for the Nix build tool if you decide to go through with this. Of course feel free to take time off if you need it, but I hope you will reconsider this particular decision at some point, as I think you are important part of that team.
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What do you mean by this? Irresponsible why? Fully half of the remaining SC has no confidence in the SC anymore, and there already seems to be sufficient justification to call for a full reelection of the entire SC. In light of that, I would really like to know why you think itās better to resign from the Nix core core team than to resign from the SC and/or vote +1 on the no confidence vote. If you truly believe being on the SC is more important than being on the Nix core team then you should also have been willing to allow the community to actively reaffirm their desire to have you on the SC. And if you didnāt do this because you believed the community might not reelect you, then that alone should be grounds for resigning from the SC.
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When elected to represent, when you resign, those who voted for you become unrepresented.
The entire point of using a representative process is to create efficiency and fair representation without requiring every single NixOS user to log in, read, and comment and like a hundred times a day or vote in an election every time thereās a Discourse thread.
The half in favor of no confidence have had more than they deserved in negative encouragement. I really doubt that the kind of pessimism that leads people to so generously interpret accusations and also so eager see the SC resign or vote no confidence will not also continue attempting to undermine, diminish, and dishearten a next SC.
What would really help is for people to propose processes and policies. Fill the vacuum before you ask it to be created. Show people that you want the process to work better. If the SC is rigid when thereās a popular choice actually in front of us, run against them in the elections. We need to see that those discontented are committed to fair representation and functioning democracy instead of never-ending hair-trigger pressure campaigns executed on Discourse and undermining actual elections.
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The problem is that the votes might as well come from the same people currently asking for resignation. Itās impossible to ask all voters for a single person whether they still feel adequatly represented, or if they are part of the folks asking for resignation.
Itās an important distinction, otherwise weāre implying that once you cast your vote, thereās nothing that can be done to voice a loss of trust (and thereby acknowledging that you donāt feel represented, to such an extent that you feel obliged to ask for resignation)
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Precisely. Creating new legitimacy is costly. While we may find out that the cost is worth it, when pressure campaigns are allowed to force us to pay that cost over and over, there is a large risk that vocal minorities just waste everyoneās energy or worse, wear out the voters until the vocal minority can gain disproportionate representation.
Iāve found a solution to precisely this problem while designing PrizeForgeās decision processes, and it relies on further representation to create a continuum of legitimacy to suit the variable demands on the system, expanding or moving the foundation of legitimacy as needed. The point is that because we all know computer science, there are many sophisticated solutions we can employ. Mobs on Discourse organized around extremely uncharitable interpretations of how things are going is among the worst possible, most illegitimate processes that can ever be employed.
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And do you think this is the situation weāre in?
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Iām sad to see you stop working on Nix.
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Absolutely. Iām not sure, but I suspect you ask this rhetorically, and I donāt fault you for it. After all, is there not a clear gathering of discontent? Put to a vote, having gathered all voices from all corners from whatever pursuits they had endeavored upon, I am afraid that this popular outpouring will once again discover the bitter foe that its organizers could not vanquish even with no holds barred leading into the first election: selection bias.
One of the funniest protest groups in the recent South Korean constitutional crisis held signs reading, āWe just want to go back to sleep.ā They could have been in bed, but they were forced by the necessity of the situation to demonstrate that they did not in fact want to return to the military dictatorship of the early 80ās. The go back to sleep vote who just wants to grill pork belly does not gather in these halls until there is no other choice. They cannot be incited. They are not activists. They make judgements based on who seems to want the system to function so that they can return to their individual pursuits. They have votes, mountains of otherwise quiet votes that must be earned and respected.
As I have engaged with this forum, the deeper I become involved in these conversations, I have increasingly detected a self-reinforcing culture of doomerism, reinforced out of an echo chamber I cannot see but can hear as the reverberation surfaces, unaware of how strange it sounds as it emerges. I find rumination, fixations on things this community cannot do real things about. I detect malicious, completely dishonest political tactics being employed with readily apparent, explicitly stated goals of achieving quick, extra-democratic outcomes. Those who believe these demonstrations to be an exercise of democracy deserving of their assistance should be cautious whenever what the demonstrations ask for will weaken representation, weakening the democratic institutions, processes, and principles they wish to defend.
In these conversations, I have also learned of honest lamentations at the fundamental problem of majority rule versus minority rights. The key to protecting minority rights is to find coalitions of more minority rights. They donāt individually have enough representation, but minorities recognize the plight of other political minorities. When helping a minority costs almost nothing to the other minorities and when the political unity of minorities enable each minority to obtain something it wants, coalitions of minorities can and often do constitute a majority on several issues. That is how you do it.
Without allies, without at least the sympathy of the go back to sleep vote, without caring about other minority interests as we do our own, without demonstrating empathy and a sincere desire for the systems and institutions to work, one may as well close their laptop, cancel their internet, and never type another message. The echo chamber will come to light and will be shone through, illuminating the emptiness of its concern for others and the defeatism that motivates it to tear institutions down in the pursuit of token gestures that will not alleviate its fixations on distant grievances.
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For what itās worth ā and replying to just that part to not derail the thread any more ā I am (IMO) a āgo back to sleepā voter myself. I suppose they just may have different activation energies, but the anduril twitter thread definitely was āitā for me. While I may be able to continue using nix just as I was even if they take over, I absolutely do not want the project handled by people who explicitly support the current policy of that country. Stop it from being taken over by the worse part of the political spectrum and I go back to sleep. Keep going and I may full well turn into a bona fide activist.
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