Announcing governance reboot!

Announcements
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I’ve been working on drafting the governance docs for Aux, and I’m excited to share what I’ve come up with! This process was shared in Aux Matrix channel, but now that the doc is closing in to completion, I’d like to share it and request for comments in a more structured way.

You can view the (not very structured) doc here. You can see that there are comments made by various members of the community, and you can make your own comments inline (requires Github account for SSO), or submit them to this thread: I’ll be reading both! In the following weeks, I’ll be transferring the contents of it into a separate repo, and making them more structured and refined. I don’t expect much to change in spirit; feel free to comment on specific issues!

There’s no hard deadline, but there are topics that would benefit from having a decision-making process, so I’d like to propose a soft deadline to be 2 weeks.

This isn’t written in the doc clearly, but during the discussion in Matrix, there was a lazy consensus that it would be good to have a community/moderation team with the starting size of 5 people. The team can then regulate its size as needed or desired. There are several people nominated for this team:

  • KFears (that’s me! Self-nominated)
  • Irenes (nominated by me, accepted)
  • Charles (nominated by me, accepted)
  • Austreelis (self-nominated)

Feel free to nominate yourself and ask questions! The final lineup is expected to be done by lazy consensus. The team will be expected to put out a conflict of interest statement. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no conflict of interest in current nominees; Charles has several small Nix-related projects they maintain, a lot of them on AFNix platform, and I have made some Lix contributions (and will be working on lix-installer soon-ish).

With the community/moderator team in place, we’ll have the decision-making process to reboot governance at large; this includes creating teams that have actionable items today and in the near future, as well as discovering the labor by previous teams that was abandoned due to the project hiatus.

Stay tuned for more!

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Nice one! I don’t have any real disagreements, so I’ll drop some comments here rather than inline, if that’s OK? I don’t feel the doc needs cluttering with me basically saying “I agree” in a long-winded way ;-)

wonder: it should be established that community guidelines are not necessarily strict, something that isn’t mentioned may still be disallowed. this gives the community an excellent tool to avoid rules lawyering, because the guidelines are guidelines, and not rules.

I’m quite a fan of this approach, yes - guidelines/principles rather than rules, and explicit acknowledgement that ultimately judgements have to be made by people. I do like a “case law” model, where you look at the history of previous decisions to inform new ones. Obviously sometimes it’s necessary to overturn a precedent that’s seen in hindsight to be illogical/unfair, or when circumstances have changed, but that should be an unusual event and highlighted as such.

KFears : I’m trying to say that, just “being excited about Nix” isn’t enough.

Yup - the shared values beyond the technology thing is key too. This is precisely why Nix/pkgs/OS is suffering at the moment - everyone there is presumably excited by Nix, but as has become clear over the last year or two there is no supermajority consensus on other values.

Inclusivity - I’m old enough to have some vestigial libertarian instincts that I’m still growing out of (sorry!), but I see no problems here. Would adding ‘traditionally’ in front ‘marginalized’ allay any concerns?

intolerance of bigotry - again, agree, but maybe “professionalizing” (ugh) the language might allay others’ concerns. An explicit reference to the Paradox of Tolerance, perhaps?

Education - again, agree, and nice to see it mentioned. As someone who’s a bit older than I suspect the average is around here, it’s always a worry that I might have a language trait, turn of phrase, etc that’s outdated and now considered harmful - it would be reassuring to know there would be an attempt at updating me first :)

Awareness - I think we probably do need to build in a bit of wiggle room here, and be aware of (sub)cultural divergences. Example that comes to mind is someone on the nixos forum who chose a Pepe the Frog avatar. Even though I’m not particularly up-to-date, even for me that had an instinctive unpleasant alt-right association - but e.g. it’s been used in Hong Kong by anti-authoritarianism protestors.

Language choice is quite instinctive, and criticizing someone’s usage can come across as quite aggressive; education is obviously still needed, but perhaps needs to be emphatically calm/gentle to start with? I also feel the degree of strictness needs to be proportional to the “officialness” of the comms; e.g. chances are at some point I will forget not to use “blacklist/whitelist” - if I do so in official documentation, obviously it needs jumping on, but perhaps not if I accidentally do it in e.g. online chat?

Moderation suggestions - re “over-enthusiastic newcomers”; in the past I’ve quite often found myself involved in projects where I didn’t have the time/energy/skills to be a core/intensive dev, but I did have a good enough technical understanding of the project that I could have been a “interface” or “translation” layer between the core team and newbies - had such a role existed, or been accepted. TBF, the lix/afnix/aux side of the nix ecosystem seems to be a lot more tolerant of newcomer’s questions than tech projects from my youth ;-) so maybe this isn’t necessary, but maybe it’s an idea to play with?

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This is a wonderfully comprehensive document, and it’s clear you put a lot of thought and work into it!

I have thoughts, but I didn’t want to clutter up the doc. Take this with many grains of salt, as I haven’t done much online community building myself and have been absent from Aux for a few months. This also isn’t meant to criticize or make demands, but add another perspective.

Community

Aux attracts all different kinds of people from all over the world, and my reaction to seeing “shared identity” is similar to dfh’s. We should welcome diversity without making it seem like people have to come from a shared background. Instead of “shared identity” and “shared experiences”, maybe “shared interest” could capture this better. At the end of the day, Aux is a technology project, and most folks will join the community because of their interest in the technology.

Inclusive

This one’s tough. If we call out bigotry specifically, we should clearly define what it means in the Aux community: is it intolerance towards anyone? Is it intolerance towards marginalized people specifically? If so, how do we determine whether someone is marginalized or not? Do we let them self-identify, and if so, what do we do when trolls inevitably start calling themselves marginalized? (You don’t need to answer these - it’s just how I’m thinking of this)

I agree with dfh on taking the focus away from bigotry specifically and generalizing it towards “intolerance,” while also calling out the intolerance paradox. We can list bigotry as one of the things we don’t tolerate. “We welcome all voices except for those that would silence, harm, or endanger other voices. This includes bigotry, racism, sexism, etc.”

Educational

I love the intent behind this, but I wouldn’t spend too much time trying to educate people, mostly because it’s an uphill battle and the Aux team is small. And like dfh and srxl mentioned, context varies depending on your background. Maybe we should clarify upfront that our community rules are based in the US and follow US customs/culture.

Accommodating

Does this include disabled accommodations? If so, it’s a non-negotiable IMO. We should remove as many barriers as possible for people with vision, hearing, etc, limitations. Another word I’ve seen in place of “creature” is “being.”

Silly
Mowr? :smiley_cat:

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I think we’d have to consult on that? As a pro-European Brit I’d be hoping for something more firmly international, tbh.

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as a US-to-Canada immigrant who’s trying to stop thinking about the country I grew up in, I share the request to not ground in any single culture. I would instead put work into figuring out what we actually mean when we say that, and identify specific positive cultural elements such as respect for people’s humanity, equality, etc.

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