Over the last couple of days, I have been in touch with the majority of the SC and spent a total of eight hours on calls trying to figure out a way forward in this deadlock: Two very good two hour calls with John and Robert, I believed - at that time. A four hour call with Tom without progress on a solution, despite my best efforts. The following is my own interpretation of where we’re at.
John is hurt. Tom is angry. Robert is sad. I am feeling betrayed. These emotions dominate our behavior. We all rationally agree, that there is a “bug” in the constitution, which creates the current deadlock. I put up a PR to fix it. Robert hearts the PR, upvotes my comment advertising it - but then just stays silent. Tom tells me that this is the “correct engineering solution”, that he agrees with - but he won’t vote for it. John appreciates my PR and tells me in internal group chats that he ‘long wished that such “bug fix” could proceed more quickly and apolitically’, while telling me in a DM that he would only approve it after the election. They all clearly know what the “right thing” to do is, but put their own interests over these of the community.
Robert never felt empowered to make decisions about the Nix team while on the SC. John worries about his reputation and whether ca-derivations will be successful. Tom doesn’t see a problem with either the Nix team or his employer on the SC - we all just have to trust him very much. The fact that we now have two forks of Nix, both because they struggled to get changes merged into upstream Nix for different reasons - doesn’t impress them too much. Personally, I do wonder - what would governance in the NixOS community look like, if we actually tried it without involvement of the Nix team for once?
Robert breaks out in tears on the call with me, because of how bad all of this is for the community. He tells us that “people are more important”. Yet, behind the scenes, he stops every progress by accusing Winter of “character assassination” of John, by calling Gabby a “coward”, by turning down proposals for progress as “weak compromise” - and by consistently voting against the community. So which people are important again? All of the community or just your friends on the Nix team?
Tom is strong. He is so strong that he will “choose the good of this project over [his] employer”, even when threatened. Tom is also naive to even ask for such a pledge. Nobody would ever expect any SC member to put their live on the line for the good of the project. When talking about employers, trust in SC members is not about trusting the person - it is about trusting the employer to never do these things. People don’t trust Anduril, no matter what Tom swears to do. I explained that to him in depth - but he still fails to see it.
But yes, Tom is strong. He made it through the “zulip wars”. Unfortunately he never stopped fighting. He spent the whole term creating “dossiers” on various people to present them to the moderation team, collecting “facts” about their misbehavior. Of course he was right there when John asked for a “List of bad things k900 did” - creating the worst collection of evidence I have ever seen. Why was K900 removed? I can’t even tell after the fact and after reading the evidence.
There is a reason, the SC did not communicate the removal of K900 as moderator - because they just can’t explain it either. So far, everybody has only talked about how the SC tried to hide the reason that they were removing K900 from the moderation team - but nobody has actually talked about that reason itself: It’s simple - there is none. K900 was removed for “insubordination”. This insubordination was largely observed by “another moderator [having] to apologize for [K900’s] behavior”. But that was entirely misunderstood - based on federation lag. A chat message appeared out of order, that’s all. Causing a community crisis on federation lag? Well done.
Whoops, the whole moderation team stepped down. A single moderator left, who is now sick in bed (get well soon, Lassulus!) after spending a week in backrooms trying to defuse the situation. The reaction to that? Internal discussions of the SC to remove official discussion spaces. No official discussion spaces, no moderation team required. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it? Herr, wirf Hirn von Himmel! (German saying roughly translated as “Lord, throw brains down from Heaven!”)
Nobody wants to admit their own failures, of course. Thus, they follow the narrative of “the drama”, “the public outrage”, or the “bad faith” actors in the community taking the governance down, like some of our community members will consistently add to the already-high-quality-discussion whenever “the mob” is active on Discourse again. Tom would “merge the [above] PR immediately, if [we] can convince [him] the same thing doesn’t happen again to the next SC”. Personally, I do wonder - wow can we guarantee that the same thing doesn’t happen again and again to the community? What would the community look like, if we actually had good governance for once?
They all play the game of stalling and filibustering extremely well. One day, John is telling the SC to be “fine staying deadlocked and keeping [his] position”. The next day he is indicating a willingness to step down, then delaying an SC meeting again and again - only to then say, that it’s still on the other SC members to convince him to step down. Tom keeps working on “proposals”, without ever actually showing any of them. For good measure, he took notes of our 4 hour talk, while repeatedly trying to lead me to say things that he could mis-quote me on. The thing that Tom worries most about is to get a hand on the leaked screenshots. Gabby puts this into nice words: “Worrying about the whistleblowing leak in this moment is like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic”.
Multiple people outside the SC have asked me whether there any adults left on the SC? I don’t know.
I only know this is a joke.
I am not making any calls to this SC anymore, because I have lost all faith in them. I have lost all faith in John, Robert and Tom being reasonable enough to put the interests of the community above their own.
I fully realize that with this post, I can’t be part of the solution anymore. I’d like to apologize to the 74 people who signed my one-sentence-letter with me, for letting them down by this. May someone else take over.