One week has passed since I started my 1 year mandate in the NixOS Steering Committee. My most essential concern for this mandate is being able to restore the trust in the project governance and ensure the long term sustainability of it. Towards these goals, I have decided to regularly publish (tentatively on the weekly or bi-weekly basis) an informal report on my action on the SC, but also on the current state of business: what are we working on, what are the blockages, what are my positions on agenda items, etc. The goal is to help the community understand what exactly the SC is doing, and do my part in terms of accountability. Community members are of course free to question my actions and my positions and contact me publicly or privately. I'll strive to strike a balance between these reports being able to penetrate the layer of secrecy that SC discussions can have, while maintaining the confidentiality I owe to my fellow SC members and not leaking private conversations. I'll also keep these notes informal and with a lesser degree of preparation that e.g. a blog post. The idea is to reduce the barrier for me to communicate with the community as much as possible.

My first order of business was to decide where to position myself on a potential vote of no-confidence. The matter was prompted to me by several community members privately, but also came naturally: the presence of several members on the committee whose resignation has been asked by a substantial amount of important community members could be a reason to discredit the future actions of this SC. For that reason my first action once elected was to probe the other newly elected SC members to understand if this new SC was in a position to achieve productive work or would be deadlocked. My conclusion is that at this point the work can go forward and that a vote of no-confidence would not go through, even if I were to vote in favor, settling the matter.

New SC members have been given appropriate access, and discussion has now started on business items on Zulip. We have been given full access to the historical Zulip messages, which I think is a very good thing for the memory of the institution, and I have been able to verify that messages related to the moderation team conflict are present, giving me a high level of confidence that no messages have been deleted prior to the transition.

This is how I approach the beginning of this SC term:

This crisis with the moderation team has essentially been left barely addressed. I am very concerned that the moderation team is currently reduced to one member, be it only for the health of Lassulus and I would like us to act fast. I think the best course of action is to leave the initiative to Lassulus to source candidates, as I believe people with moderation experience are more capable than us to identify people suitable to tackle this (difficult) task. The SC can then still individually approve candidates of course. I'll push for action in this area as soon as possible.

We know from the composition of the Steering Committee that passing any vote is going to require compromises and I actually expect that getting anything meaningful done is not going to be easy. The worse thing though would be the SC continuing to stagnate, essentially proving to be useless as a governance tool. For that reason, and in a spirit of building trust between members of the SC, I am trying to put forward all the proposals that emerged from the election period to improve how the SC function. My hope are that those proposals will be mostly consensual and still get the ball moving. For that reason, I have already introduced the voting of the constitution amendment on no-confidence votes when some seats are vacants to the agenda. I consider this to be purely technical, no direct consequences (as no seats are vacants) and as such a good first vote. So far I am hopeful because John expressed approval privately, giving us a potential supermajority.

I am also in favor of implementing constitution changes to improve the transparency of the SC. Nearly all candidates to the election agreed it was a priority, so again, I expect that we can find consensual proposals on this domain. I have a few ideas in mind but I'd like to hear if some other come up from the call for contributions I published.