I am relieved that we have finally announced the bootstrap team, after a long stretch during which the task was making little progress. I am now orgnaizing first meetings between the SC and the new team to initiate discussions on the core issues we have set out to solve.

I have been frustrated enough times by this cultural issue within the SC that I think it's important to talk about it for future reference. My conception of the SC is that it should be an enabler: it should strive to put the contributors of the project in the best conditions to do their work in their area of expertise. It should not try to be a leader at the top that takes the decisions that will impact everyone downstream. For me, a good indicator of the health of the community is the ratio between the number of decisions the SC takes and the number it is able to delegate.

However, I have seen the very opposite pattern going on within the SC more often than I would like. I have a few examples in mind, and it also shows up in a lot of micro-situations:

• Early in the term, a vote was oppened in the SC on declaring flakes stable; my stance at the time was that this question was not ours to answer but the Nix team's.

• Recently, when discussing funding initiatives, we touched on the topic of creating a global technical roadmap for the community, in order to know which initiatives to fund first if we had some budget for that. When I was told that the SC could easily build such a roadmap, I had to re-argue that creating a roadmap for the community should involve all teams, would require a significant coordination effort, and should absolutely not be done by the SC unilaterally.

• Robert recently took the initiative to start building up a proposal for an AI policy for our community, essentially defining the "etiquette" of using AI in our spaces. I personally welcome this initiative warmly, and I am happy to see other SC members make concrete proposals. However, when I hinted that this topic should be discussed with the new Bootstrap team as it falls entirely within their purview, I received a lot of pushback for it.

I am worried that this culture is going to perpetuate the vicious cycle that has characterized our governance so far: decisions get taken unilaterally, contributors are unhappy that they were not consulted on their ownership area, they get demotivated or angry, and the communication rift amplifies.

• As far as I know, the negotiation between the Foundation board and the consortium of companies that want to fund some hardware and work for the CUDA team is still ongoing. I am staying vigilant on the terms of what is being decided and in contact with members of the team. Will keep updating.

• The NixOS Foundation has participated in a consortium applying to a European Commission funding call (Horizon DATA02). The bulk of the work has been done with Valentin, negotiating with other consortium members to converge towards a credible proposal. The amounts at play here could be very interesting for us, but the probability of success seems pretty low.