I’m somewhat surprised from all the firm optimism that electing again will magically solve such conflicts.
As I see it, many aspects of this remind me of state-level politics. Including the part that the community just isn’t able to get consensus on some topics. And as the SC is designed to represent the community somewhat well, it’s natural that it also won’t build consensus easily on those topics. If we reduced the SC size, consensus in the SC itself would be easier, but I don’t think it would make the community that much happier.
And I personally do like that Nixers are a very diverse set, even though it implies that we don’t share opinion on many topics. I still do think it’s worth trying to build consensus as far as possible and move in the directions that are shared widely. (regardless of how many SC members get kept this time) I believe the strong points should be in the technical aspects, not e.g. in world’s best discussion moderation system.
I think you and several others who have reached other conclusions might be missing why people are upset. We want transparency from the SC.
So, if they were like “this person’s vibes are bad and we vote to remove them” then what you must tell the community “this persons’ vibes are bad and we have removed them.” This would’ve still caused some concern, and the SC knew that, but at least they would’ve been transparent about the reasons.
You should not say “This person’s vibes are bad, we vote to remove them, now we must find actual evidence of the bad vibes to tell the community.” This is the wrong order of operations. You can not get rid of someone based on a feeling then go find reasons why you got rid of them. Is this is same SC who wanted to move towards more objective moderation?
What should’ve happened: “This person’s vibes are bad. Vibes are a feeling. Can I back that up with actual evidence?” Then find the evidence. If you don’t find evidence, then your feeling is bad. If you do find evidence, then you present the evidence and call for a vote.
I think it’s a struggle for individual humans to make decisions this way. The unitarity of our minds is, I think, a convenient illusion, and per studies of reaction times and nervous system activation, our decisions often precede our rational justifications. I try to fight my biases anyway, myself, and I hope that my leaders do likewise — but it’s one of quite a lot of things I hope for my leaders to do, and nobody’s perfect.
But for collectives of people? This is a wholly unreasonable expectation. Just read jtojnar’s and Gabriella’s accounts of these events again. There was a vote before there was a single, consistent, principled justification for the action. Do you want the SC never to vote until they’ve worked out the right thing to do from first principles? If so, have you ever been on a committee? In my experience, when time is any factor at all, committees will often push for votes as a way to cut through endless discussion and inaction. I fear you will be disappointed by leadership bodies with more than one member again and again if you hold them to that standard.
[Edited to change which paragraph of paperdigits’ post I quoted. I initially selected the wrong paragraph and couldn’t edit it when I realized because of slow mode.]
The SC knew that fpletz had resigned when they voted. Had the SC bought this argument by one more vote, it would have passed, but it did not. The counterfactual is inscrutable. If fpletz had not resigned, would there have been a hung vote for them to swing or would more of the current SC decided to soldier on?
I wouldn’t recommend fpletz as a future candidate because they are responsible for not having a vote and denying those who voted for them representation. The job wasn’t to win everything they wanted. The job was to make a process work. Good constitutional changes can be made a central issue to future elections. If won, those elections can create new legitimate authority to carry out those changes. Resignations and brigades of outrage are not the way. Popular sovereignty really becomes necessary when you won’t get a next fair election, not when you hate the outcome.
I read it. I understand the implications. Why doesn’t it strike me as mustache twirling evil? Not every thought that goes through my head is pristine, especially not at the inception. Creative entropy and willingness to pursue all angles is essential to unearthing new good things. A person would drive themselves mad treating every intermediate result as a final judgement of their own character. When we look for patterns of behavior, we look at actions, not considerations, not half-baked thoughts in the middle of drafting. I want to see the consciously chosen result of a person’s cooking. I also believe the words have been cherry picked and arranged so as to seem much more ominous than they are.
Secondly, it’s one member of the SC, whose job is to represent. If a representative I was most politically aligned against said something terrible, I would not demand their resignation because I understand that they represent someone besides me. That’s democracy. When a crowd is incited to march the torches after their political adversary, that’s populism and inevitably a prelude to something less democratic.
Finally, this thread, this intended campaign to exert spontaneously organized, activist power over the representative SC, is all less representative than the body it seeks to impose extra-democratic change upon. I use “extra-democratic” in the sense of “extra-judicial” as in outside the legitimate order. These threads are not representative. They inherently create massive selection bias and seek change through rash decisions under intense emotional pressure. This denies representation to those who were busy living and writing code. Asking thousands of NixOS users, again and again, to engage in extra-democratic pressure campaigns can only erode representation. It is the use of illegitimate, extra-democratic tactics to upset the democratic process, likely in hopes of some specific interests making gains in a renewed phase of chaos.
My overall recommendation to everyone:
focus on process, not outcomes
stop participating in these popular pressure campaigns designed to push the only representative process we have beyond the breaking point
embrace a bit of institutionalism and the inherent efficiency of representative systems, even when people we disagree with are also represented
My 2c… I find it odd that the post is calling finding evidence “lying”.
The SC claims they wanted moderation to be more “objective”, and while they identified a mod who they believe was not acting “objectively”, simply saying “this mod didn’t fit” would come off hypocritical. Of course, personal opinions will nearly always affect human decisions. And of course, the SC must nevertheless provide a justification and evidence.
Sure the phrasing could have been better, but that phrasing was never intended to be public anyway.
Also, I don’t see any indication that the SC was planning to fabricate evidence; presumably they would be identifying actual actions that were taken - simply factual occurrences - and summarizing them in such a way that would support their personal opinions. (And in terms of moderation, the bad tends to outweigh the good, so I wouldn’t even call it cherry-picking to focus on the bad. I’d only have concerns if the evidence was taken out of context.)
Without further details, it’s impossible for most of us to determine whether that original plan to remove the mod was purely to bully said mod or rather well-intentioned. However, to date neither the mod team nor the SC were being transparent about what happened. (And by design, moderation will be less transparent; why do we want to reinforce that?)
But ultimately why did the community vote for these SC members? The community believed in them, yes? And if the community is now unhappy with said members, isn’t that the point of elections? Surely the community should find a way to improve the process (including clarifying the scope of SC activities and how those activities are implemented) rather than excoriating individual members who participated.
If we can’t expect transparency in the decision making and clear communication of that decision afterward, what are we to expect? If collectively the SC can’t make a logical, solid decision then communicate that to the community, then they’re not fit to be on the SC.
Yes I’ve read them. I find the idea that “lacking an easily articulable reason” but stil voting to remove someone from a position is bad. I think that trying to articulate that reason after the fact is also bad.
There doesn’t have to be a singular justification, and it seemed they reached the same conclusion, that the person should be removed, though for different reasons. So summarize those reasons and put out a statement. This isn’t that hard. Again, I expect transparency in decision making and clear communication about the process.
I mean… here we are.
I never implied that it was per-meditated evil, so please do not try and add emotional weight to my argument that isn’t there.
What I don’t want is a ready, fire, aim governance, which is what seems to have happened here. I want transparency and clarity in the communication. Sorry but that didn’t happen.
I can’t think of anything less democratic than what you just wrote, which seems to be a very thesaurus-heavy stab at “this doesn’t effect enough people to be important,” especially when we think of democracy as (1) relating to the idea that all people should be treated equally and (2) organized or operated so that all people involved have power, influence, etc.
I’m a nix user, somewhat of a bystander who rarely interacts. I do care about the nix-ecosystem though.
It pains me to regularly see posts in the form ‘us against them’. Who are ‘us’, who are ‘them’? This seems to be a form of tribalism exaggerated through the lens of online discourse (reminds me of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0). This can only lead to extreme reactions and positions—and ultimately, to burned out people who might otherwise have contributed for years to come.
Instead of rushing to conclusions and assigning blame, perhaps everyone should take a breather, sleep on it, and empathise with a position one does not agree with first.
Please remember that you are interacting with humans here who mostly use their free time for this. The nix ecosystem thrives when we assume good intent and focus on our shared goals.
I feel like this is pretty telling that out of the four members of the SC that were elected for a 2-year term, two of them quit after a year or less. In the initial announcement of his departure, fpletz did not directly attribute the reasons to the SC itself, but now in his post above, he does say that “it [the SC] burned [him] out pretty good”, which is an interesting phrasing, given that Gabriella also said earlier that she “burned out on Steering Committee work”.
Some of the other things described in Gabriella’s blog are also easier to interpret with the additional context now, especially the mention of “filibusters”.
As others above, I observe that out of the initial 7 elected members of the SC, only 3 of them are clinging to their positions by refusing a full re-election (and by being candidate again, for the one that has his position ending at this cycle), while 4 are stepping down and/or not running again, but given that fpletz has already stepped down, the outcome is a tie and no full re-election is possible.
Now, I really wonder why it is important for these 3 to cling so hard to their positions to the point of letting go a more technical position and some of the respect that we had for them. Is it really just because they felt like they did nothing wrong that would justify ending their mandate early? Is it because they think it is essential to have some continuity on the SC (which could still happen if some of its members were re-elected)? Or is it about giving a larger share of the SC to the part of the community that still feels represented by them?
In the interest of transparency, instead of piecemeal sharing of the documents and hashes which cannot be verified without those documents, the concerned parties should release what they have, full and unredacted.
To the extent that the court of public opinion is still a court, the jury should be allowed to see all the evidence instead of needing to rely on vetting by colleagues of the accusers.
Otherwise, we’re just going off of “just trust us”.
Yes. In this situation, burn out is normal.
Some SC refuse to step down and said “because that would be irresponsible.”
He was indirectly saying those burn out and leave were irresponsible, which is no empathy, and just unacceptable.
Right. The way I tend to see things like this (not knowing again anything about this particular instance): We tend to assume that groups of “others” function as a hive mind. SC has this opinion, feminists that, right-wingers that. Whereas in reality you don’t need 10 people to have such a mess of views that there’s no coherent way to explain it as a whole; and, if they act on several issues by voting on them individually, it may even be that there’s no coherent single “mind” that would make those choices.
We know from psychology that people are usually quite certain about why they hold some position, yet it’s invariably affected by other things they would swear it’s not. Do they lie when they explain their decision? I guess in a sense, yes, but against their knowledge and when the only alternative is not explaining.
Well, it’s more chaotic when there’s a group. Imagine a group of people voting for what to eat. One doesn’t want to eat round objects, so pizza is out. One is vegetarian. Four people just like pizza. Two are afraid that the vote would go to pea soup if they don’t vote for pizza, so they vote for pizza. Why did the group choose pizza? In a sense, it’s a more collaborative version of what an individual does subconsciously, but also in a much more messy setting.
So, in a sense, if you need to give an explanation, it will necessarily end up being some kind of a post-hoc analysis of reasons. Now, of course, there may be different degrees of “community management” going into it, and that’s probably not good (but individuals do it too, all the time).
I would still point at “wanting to speak as a single voice” as the most likely culprit of everything here. Wanting to have a “true explanation” of why something happened, as if the group was a hive-mind. (And I see that as a failing of the SC, not the community. The community is right to demand explanations and transparency, in my mind.)
(repost to fix a typo, given our current limitations of slow mode - apologies:)
I call to disband SC in its entirety and to retire the institution pending a new approach to community
To make it clear to people why they may want this, this raises some questions on how revising institutional form might connect to addressing the issues at hand, potentially bringing us back to conversations at the Zulip instance on this.
If the NixOS Foundation doesn’t offer a consistent political platform and insist on it,
Now, the foundation had a consistent goal. The issue with that turned out that goal was ostensibly consistent with taking the Anduril money, without more formally taking into consideration the community.
The SC seemed intended to cover that base, but well, given the community consists of a diverse set of individuals, one would wonder what consistent political platform might match that - if not our constitution, which one might consider vague enough to not necessarily fill all the gaps our day-to-day decisions may call for.
The SC not having a shared political platform follows from that diverse community, formalized in its selection by proportional representation in our election - which just seeks to reflect voter preferences.
then this community space will always be unsafe for the vulnerable in the global community.
Isn’t this then because our elected candidates opted not to run on such a platform - yet still got elected?
If we were to put values over electorate then, who decides on those rules, if not (delegates of) that electorate?