I am voluntarily ending my Steering Committee term early (I am only serving out a one-year term instead of two) and I wanted to document the reasons for my early exit.
The short version is: I believe the Steering Committee is in need of reform in order to be effective and in its present state it does not set up the Nix community for success nor does it set up individual Steering Committee members for success. In particular, I’m resigning because I’m unable to make progress on issues that I care about and campaigned on even when there is a Steering Committee supermajority in favor of these policy positions.
That might sound surprising, which brings me to the longer version of my concerns, starting with:
Size
I believe the Steering Committee is too large and should be reduced in size (which would require a change to the Constitution). I think the Steering Committee should be (conservatively) reduced to five members and possibly (more aggressively) reduced to even just three members. The large size of the Steering Committee is counterproductive because of:
diffusion of responsibility
Steering Committee members are less willing to step up and volunteer for various responsibilities if they believe they can offload that responsibility onto another Steering Committee member.
This also has multiple negative downstream effects. For example, you tend to see an unequal division of responsibilities which in turn leads to all participants engaging less: the participants who volunteer too much burn out and the participants who volunteer too little check out.
more stagnation
It’s much harder and slower to round up a majority of votes on anything when the committee is larger. This doesn’t just affect final votes on community policies: it slows down intermediate steps such as delegation of tasks, public statements … everything. The high latency and activation energy surrounding all of these things kills momentum on a lot of internal efforts and fosters a committee culture of learned helplessness.
greater difficulty building consensus
The Steering Committee can technically force certain policies/statements/initiatives through by simple majorities over the protest of the minority, but we try to avoid this as much as possible because that’s an easy way to kill the working relationship between committee members (and it’s already hard enough to get anything done when the working relationship is good).
The consensus-building is also particularly difficult because of the next issue:
Timidity
Consensus-building wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the Steering Committee were willing to force through certain policies with a vote but many of the current Steering Committee members do not have the temperament to “disagree and commit”, which means that if any committee member raises an objection and/or filibusters then the issue typically dies in committee. In particular, several committee members will wait for unanimous consensus before formally voting in support of something. For example, there were a few cases where we had a supermajority of the committee theoretically in support of a policy and we still got bogged down trying to please a highly vocal minority instead of shutting them down.
Poor self-organization and internal policies/procedures
As the first “edition” of the Steering Committee we had to self-organize and figure out how we would operate. I think there are some things we got right, but also some things that I believe we got wrong.
I think one of the big mistakes we made was that we insisted on “speaking with one voice”, meaning that we could not make any meaningful external statements or comments without getting majority approval from the committee (something we had difficulty with on the regular). This is why the committee remained largely silent or slow-to-respond on a large number of issues.
This problem got bad enough that at some point many members began to break the wall of silence by commenting in an unofficial capacity on high-profile issues so that outsiders would get some visibility into what was going on instead of waiting for us to completely the slow process of gathering enough consensus and votes.
Another internal policy that I believe was counter-productive was not disclosing the final votes on various issues or requiring individual signatories on public statements. Had we done this it would have likely broken a lot of internal stalemates and filibusters if all committee members were held publicly accountable for their policy positions (and therefore subject to public pressure).
It would have also helped with another issue, which was:
Absenteeism
For various reasons (some justifiable, some not), at many points in time a large number of committee members would be unreachable, even during crucial junctures like ongoing controversy. This absenteeism was masked by the committee not publicizing that fact earlier. If we had required all votes to be publicly recorded and all statements to require individual signatories it would have exposed this absenteeism earlier (and led to quicker corrections).
Conclusion
I burned out on Steering Committee work for the above reasons, which is why I’m ending my term after one year instead of two.
I hope that people reading this push for reforms and candidates that will address the current stagnation on the committee, which is why I’m breaking the wall of silence to publicize my criticisms. I’ve done my part attempting to fix some of these issues but I haven’t been successful in doing so (one reason why I believe that I’m not the correct person for the job).
I don’t want to give the impression that the Steering Committee accomplished nothing or that they were a force for bad/harm. There were several positive outcomes of the Steering Committee’s first year, but overall I feel like there is still wasted potential that could be improved upon. I originally ran for the Nix Steering Committee because I want to see Nix win, meaning that I want Nix to go mainstream and I also want Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs to come out ahead against other forks.
The early end of my term means that there is another Steering Committee opening for the upcoming election, so if you believe you can do a better job of fixing the problem I encourage you to run for the seat I’m vacating. There are five openings on the Steering Committee up for election, so there is ample opportunity for newcomers to shake things up.