Steering Committee Report - Aug 9 2026

Yesterday, the Nixpkgs core team announced its disbandment. Firstly, I'll start by saying that I am very grateful for the work that the Nixpkgs core team has been able to do. I am, like a large part of the community, of the opinion that the creation of the core team was one of the best things to happen to the community for quite a while. Seeing it disband is as such a great disappointment for me. I invite everyone to read their Discourse post to understand the reasons, but I will summarize them as:

1. the two remaining team members are burning out and are unable to continue a job that is much more time-consuming than anticipated;

2. they were unable to recruit people to take over;

3. both points (1) and (2) are at least partially caused by the difficulty of working with the SC, the SC lacking "a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution", not being "sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions" at that level, and having tendencies towards micromanagement.

I take those reasons extremely seriously, and this is in my opinion a great failure of the Steering Committee. The SC should act as the glue in our community, supporting teams when they need it, delegating efficiently. Instead, we are apparently making the life of team members harder, which is not acceptable. I take personal responsibility in this. I have tried my best to fight against the persistent culture of wanting to take the decisions in a top-down manner instead of delegating, but I have unfortunately failed.

If we "unzoom" a bit, this is now the second team to resign pointing at difficulties with working with the SC. It's not a one-time thing, it's not about one particular SC composition, it's about structural issues that are in my opinion specific to our governance model.

By design, the composition of the SC is conflicted. This is the core of our voting system: representativeness means there will be SC members for every minority line in the community. You can consider this to be a good thing, I am not discussing this. But in the end, it means there is no real majority in the SC and every decision is subject to discussion¹. This means that the SC is a structure that is deeply unfit to take decisions quickly. Every topic necessitates some amount of discussion before reaching a point where 4/7 members are ready to say yes. In a context of high latency due to geo-distribution and the SC not being our main activity, this sometimes amounts to days or weeks before a decision is reached.

For the same reasons as above, the conflicted composition of the SC means there is not a lot of trust among members initially: they are people that probably openly disagreed on topics prior to their election, so of course some amount of distrust exists at least initially. The problem is that this setting makes individual members consider their term on an individualistic level, instead of seeing the SC as a team, and collaboration between members is extremely minimal. This means some members contribute extremely little to the workload of the SC, some do come up with proposals but make no effort to discuss/refine them, so they have no chance of reaching consensus, etc. My personal experience of this has been the effort to rebuild the moderation team. It took me several months of effort to come up with a sensible proposal and refine it until it was acceptable to 6/7 members of the SC. That took effort, discussions, a lot of time and a real will to find an acceptable compromise. When the proposal was accepted, I was expecting that, as it was approved by the SC, the whole SC was going to help implement the plan and contribute to the discussions and the effort. It was not the case. In fact, as far as I can remember, only Philip and Christina interacted with the bootstrap team. My impression was that the prevailing sentiment was that "it's not my proposal, it's not my problem", a dynamic I had already described in April. I personally was not able to continue putting all my energy into that matter and as such the bootstrapping is not progressing.

This one is in my opinion less of a cultural problem than it is a structural problem. Being unfit to take decisions or do meaningful work at a rate sufficient to sustain the needs of the project, we should at least be able to delegate those decisions to the teams that are more fit to take them. This is not the case in practice, and I explain it in several ways:

1. Some members seem to believe that steering is actually taking those strategic decisions, and that is the reason they ran for the SC in the first place. I have already detailed those examples in a previous report:

   • Voting to make flakes stable for example, rather than discussing this with the Nix team;

   • Working on a project-wide AI policy without the will to involve the moderation team or the nixpkgs core team (that were also working on similar policies);

   • The elaboration of a technical roadmap for the project in a top-down manner rather than bottom up;

   • Voting on how NixCon sponsorship tiers may be sold, which in my opinion was a Foundation and organizers matter rather than an SC one.

2. The permanent state of conflict in the community: some members, especially members remaining from the first SC term, have a deep distrust of the members of other essential teams of the project (moderation team, core team). They tend to believe those teams are always against the SC and are extremely reluctant to give away their control to delegate a decision or even to work collaboratively with those teams.

Besides those cultural/interpersonal issues, I think the situation is not made easy by the kind of "ivory tower" the SC is put in. Structurally, nothing forces the SC to have any kind of regular contact with the different teams. And as a consequence, it mostly has none. Obviously each individual SC member has some amount of informal communication with the teams, but that doesn't help with communication of the SC as an entity.

I take the situation very seriously. Looking back, it doesn't feel that I am leaving the community in a much better state than when I was elected, and this worries me. I am not one to hold on to a position of power if I think I am not benefiting the community, so I have been giving this a lot of thought. I believe the only thing I could meaningfully do during the rest of my term is to work towards fixing the structural issues I have discussed above, so that the next wave of SC members may be in the optimal conditions to do great work, and not fail in the same way that we did.

I have opened a discussion on that matter to see who would be willing to find solutions with me: so far, the outcome has been pretty disappointing: John and Tom don't seem to see the problem, Christina doesn't wish to engage with the current SC.