EDIT; Moderation transparency note by piegames: This was originally posted as a reply to The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded , I’ve split it out together with the relevant replies into this dedicated thread to not derail the original topic.
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Three things:
I earlier talked to @qyliss, whom I’ve always held in the absolute highest regard (and still do), a bit to debrief. I don’t really have much to say about the actual things being discussed. The Nixpkgs Core team has barely come up on the SC’s agenda, and I personally feel we’ve been in “delegate and be thankful that we can” mode. There is not some long-standing fight here. The claim of “micromanagement” is thus objectively false.
I am totally sick of open letters. I can’t believe we’re doing this again (major team resigns before election) — even though the circumstance are so different this time. More than anything else this is horrible de je vu that I would not wish upon anyone.
The highest trust move is a private resignation, and then a public joint statement that allows multiple sides to agree on some basic facts, and offer some muted opinions. My god, how I wish we could do that instead. My god, how I wish we could do that instead.
I hope we do do that instead going forward and never have another open letter ever again. Open letters with one-sided denunciations are not a healthy way to work through issues at all, and rather a last resort when all other avenues of dialogue have failed. Yet it’s one that we’ve normalized as a primary way of conducting community business. This normalization has occurred because we’re not a healthy community, and unhealthy communities normalize unhealthy behavior unwittingly.
Side note: another thread was hinting at a Lixpkgs. Multiple package sets maintained by multiple groups that each get along much better within groups than between groups could solve the trust problem. At this point, I am not opposed to trying it.
I can understand you having such a reaction, even though I don’t perceive it in the same way at all. In fact, you as an SC member desiring that a team which decides to disband go through you as the SC first for communication, is in my eyes the same kind of micromanagement that has been pointed out here.
That being said, I’d like to not derail this discussion by centering the SC once again. Especially because many factors have contributed to the core team disbanding, as per their own telling. So let’s keep this topic focused on the core team instead, and if people wish so open a new discussion centered around the SC’s general operations.
First, I want to take a moment to thank the Nixpkgs core team for their work, including the members who have left since then, that is @K900 and @wolfgangwalther.
That said, I do need to correct something real quick and apologize for hijacking momentarily this thread, because it is the kind of remark that quietly takes on a life of its own if left unaddressed.
I want to address this directly because I have seen it surface in multiple places now for years and it’s now in the mouth of someone in a leadership position. As a Lix core team member, there’s no Lixpkgs, no plan for one, not a goal. I’d ask that before amplifying claims about what another project is or isn’t planning, people verify those claims against that project’s own public statement.
I wish only the best for the new journeys for Emily and Alyssa, especially, excited and hopeful to hear and see more about Spectrum or the more recent autopen work :).
FWIW I think an open statement like this is exactly what we need. I don’t feel attacked, I tried really hard to get this to work for the nixpkgs team, I couldn’t, now they’re leaving, and those consequences I keep mentioning that our inability to act are gonna cause have are coming due once again. Once again.
So lets stop arguing with reality! The SC keeps causing this, the teams are just delivering the receipts on our dysfunction. If only we’d read the feedback instead of just defaulting to defensiveness, we’d be a very different, very good place.
Exactly how has the SC caused this? Now we have to opposite statements from two different SC members. Are there public meeting notes documenting whatever issues are behind this?
You also have a statement directly from the team that just resigned, and a statement last year from the moderation team that resigned. Just to be clear.
You guys can keep arguing privately. It does not benefit the community for you to air your dirty laundry in public. These are the signs of an immature organization.
You should run for the Steering Committee and change that! I’m sure you’d have a lot of useful input. Can’t say I’d vote for you, but if you want to make it a more “mature organization” nothing is stoping you from doing that.
Telling me in a comment sure isn’t going to change anything, trust me. So better get ready for the election! I’ll see you on the ballot.
I am not looking for statements, I am looking for evidence of how the issues were raised to the SC, discussed in the SC and so forth. Post-mortem if you so will.
This is a frankly embarrassing post to make. The Nixpkgs core team has been one of the most positive forces for good in recent memory. Attempting to turn a sad situation about Nixpkgs burnout into a flamewar is childish. I would say I expected better, but I’d be lying.
(To be clear, the top post in this topic was originally a comment in the other topic, before being split off by a moderator.)
(This part was supposed to be a reply to the comment above. One day I’ll get the hang of Discourse.)
This is unkind and unwarranted. The original post went to great lengths to criticize the Steering Committee for failing to meet the needs of the nixpkgs core team. That’s fair, but it’s also only fair, natural, and healthy that a member of the SC respond with his own opinion, especially if he or the rest of the SC were not given that opportunity before the original announcement.
Agreed, and it’s astounding to me that this is not the normal behavior.
I think a lot of people fail to appreciate just how damaging the endless, for lack of a better word, “drama”, is and has been to Nix and its ecosystem. Every single time this forum blows up into a giant controversy, uncountable onlookers lose interest in Nix, and begin to reconsider their use of it. The common opinion these days is that Nix is wonderful technology, but its community is extreme and toxic.
It does not have to be this way. If the nixpkgs core team is burnt out and wants to disband, fine, but that announcement should not be unilaterally made without informing and discussing it first with the Steering Committee before “going public”. Expecting teams to report such important decisions to the highest level of project leadership first, and to discuss it with that leadership and release a joint statement, is not “micromanagement”, it’s the bare minimum of a functional organization.
The Steering Committee should consider ways to normalize and enforce a process that guarantees they will receive prior notice, and have a reasonable window to prepare, for such announcements.
Yes, I absolutely would have not opened a new thread with this. I wrote it as a reply and meant it as such. While I think “derail” is a bit of an unnecessary editorialization — I don’t believe that I was derailing — I appreciate the mods adding the notice on the top so this is no longer unclear.
I do really think before an open statement they could have
a. had a talk with SC first about it (Eg. meeting or matrix room) so there is full transparency with SC team (including the expressed concerns about the burnout) and also,
b. made SC review the discourse post before going live so therefore SC has had time to review the post, so the post is written professionally and ethically that would be suitable if you were at work.
Because the main two issues are one not having SC aware of this post so much so that it was IMO not written professionally and non-ethic at a work place making users think we are becoming a immature organization, because users are left who do I go to when a* issue arises and there is no core team, SC? and also two sorting out issues with SC transparently, which leads to questions like Is the teams fully transparent as promised or is that a lie? Probably speculative, but a good question.
This is quite poor reasoning. This isn’t a workplace, but an open-source project and community. Quite different from a company, actually!
Furthermore, even if we were to go by your guidelines, I would describe their post as quite professional: they didn’t attack anyone, but named the issues with the SC as an institution.
What? How are these things even related? How would they sort out issues “transparently,” while also abiding by your guideline to sort things out with them in private, before speaking about them publicly?
If you mean “all teams must be transparent to the SC and any step towards hiding something from the SC is bad and means the team can’t be trusted,” it makes sense that one wouldn’t do that if they’re afraid of being micromanaged. What good does being transparent with the body that makes your job harder to perform do?
You’re trying to frame this as a gotcha, but the way I see it, it makes sense that they want to drop everything and run without the SC having the opportunity to change the narrative, based on what they believe is true about the SC.
A “public joint statement” doesn’t work if the purpose of the joint statement is to obfuscate the specifics. The SC is very obviously the root of the dysfunction, and therefore cannot be expected to repair itself without outside pressure.
Surely I am not alone in finding the notion of adopting a posture of having speech restricted by the masters of an open source project - as a move to attract members - supremely hilarious?
@AngryAnt, is this in response to John hoping for no more ‘open letters’ (his words; not how I would describe the original post), or something else?
If the former, I don’t think it’s meant as a restriction on speech. There’s an important distinction between being sick of a mode of expression, or finding that mode of expression to be harmful even, and telling people they can’t do that anymore. My read is that John is squarely on the first side of that divide (and the current moderators have no intention of cracking down on public statements in the we-are-stopping-work-and-here’s-why format in general as a mode of expression).