A critical look at the candidates and their focus: Technical Excellence vs. Governance Reform.
Candidates who prioritize core technical mission, meritocracy, and objective project governance. This group represents the central focus of the project.
Candidates focused on healing divisions by building better, transparent, and neutral governance structures to support the technical mission:
Candidates who bring specialized knowledge to specific technical improvements within the ecosystem:
These candidates emphasize social change, cultural initiatives, and increased oversight, but are running on separate, distinct platforms.
Candidates primarily focused on leading a cultural shift and addressing external issues like corporate and political alignment.
Divergence: This group is split between pursuing external political action (anti-MIC, brand protection) and demanding SC deference to project teams (K900), creating fundamental contradictions on the scope and authority of the Steering Committee's role.
Candidates focused on transparency, community health, and ensuring SC oversight of project teams.
Divergence: Platforms range from pursuing radical systemic change (voter recall, constitutional amendments) to more focused, internal cultural goals (meetups, health), demonstrating a lack of consensus on the *mechanism* or *urgency* of reform.
Candidates who previously held official moderation or release roles and are focused on re-establishing community ties and fixing past issues.
Divergence: These candidates root their platforms in historical roles and personal reconciliation (patching things up, returning to past systems), distinct from the systemic reform or external political goals sought by the other two fragmented groups.
Research the candidates. Read their platforms. Look at their technical contributions. Ask hard questions about their stance on project governance. Then vote for those who will keep Nix focused on what matters: building the best functional package manager and OS in the world.
View Full Candidate Info →The Nix ecosystem needs a Steering Committee that can execute. A strong consensus majority of candidates are aligned on the core priorities: restoring predictable governance, focusing on technical merit, and unblocking the project's infrastructure and developer teams. Your vote should aim to enable this core group to translate clear direction into productivity.
For years, the project has been slowed by turmoil. The necessary solutions—improved documentation, CI automation, governance stability, and clear moderation policies—are well-known. Electing a SC with too many divergent voices risks creating further gridlock and endless discussion on already clear problems, postponing the technical solutions the community desperately needs.
Since 2021, the Nix community has experienced escalating conflicts over moderation, governance, and the role of social commentary in a technical project. This culminated in significant community turnover in 2024.
The 2025 SC election will determine whether Nix returns its focus to technical contributions and meritocracy, or continues toward increased ideological gatekeeping and cultural initiatives that have contributed to community turnover.
This is your opportunity to shape the future direction of Nix. Choose candidates who will prioritize technical excellence, democratic accountability, and inclusive collaboration based on technical contributions to swiftly implement the changes needed for a stable project.
One of the most important issues in this election is community moderation governance. The current system has raised concerns over accountability, creating potential for abuse and subjective enforcement. The SC must commit to ensuring moderation is transparent and mission-focused.
A healthy technical community requires governance that serves the project's mission. Democratic accountability ensures moderators work for the community, not as an independent body.
Vote for candidates prioritizing technical excellence, meritocracy, community cohesion, transparency, and pragmatism.
Candidates should demonstrate deep technical understanding of Nix, NixOS, and the ecosystem. The SC's primary role is steering technical direction, not social engineering.
True inclusivity means welcoming contributors based on their code, ideas, and collaboration—not their political beliefs or identity markers. Great software comes from great engineers.
The Nix community should remain united around our shared love of functional package management and declarative systems. Avoid candidates who inject unnecessary cultural conflicts.
Demand clear governance processes, open decision-making, and responsiveness to community concerns. No backroom deals or ideological gatekeeping.
Support candidates who make practical decisions that benefit users and developers, not those pushing abstract frameworks that alienate significant portions of the community.
Be mindful of these points when evaluating platforms, to ensure the focus remains on the project's technical goals: