The Election Committee announces the third Steering Committee election

Another year has passed since the Nix community voted in the second Nix Steering Committee. As some of their terms are coming to an end, the community must once again cast their ballots to form the next SC. Call to action If you are an automatically eligible voter, check your email in the voter list: https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/edit/main/eligible.csv If you are not automatically eligible but significantly contributed to the official projects in one way or another, you may ask for an exception Who can vote? The constitution defines a process for automatic voter eligibility based on the number of commits and merge actions in merged PRs opened by a person in any of the projects inside the NixOS GitHub organisation. The minimal number of commits for automatic eligibility is 25 The minimal number of merges for automatic eligibility is 1 The eligibility window is the past 4 years from and to 1 Aug (see table below for exact dates) Who can run? Nominees and endorsers must themselves be eligible voters. How to request an exception People who have contributed to the official projects in a verifiable and substantial[1] way may send us an email at elections@nixos.org. Provide references to contributions Specify which email address you wish to use for voting A non-exhaustive list of examples of contributions: participation in official teams infrastructure maintenance organisation of official events maintenance of official third-party accounts (e.g. social media) significant contribution to important PRs under overall PR authorship of other users How to become a candidate The outline of the candidate process is as follows: Either nominate yourself or accept a nomination by another person Fill out the candidate template Receive sufficient endorsements to become a candidate Please read the linked documentation for in-depth descriptions of the process. Comparison to last year’s election Automatic voter email discovery In response to feedback from last year, we reintroduced automatic discovery of voter emails (e.g. last year’s emails, maintainer list entries). All automatically eligible voters need to verify the email they wish to use in the eligible voter list: https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2026/edit/main/eligible.csv This can be any email, it does not need to correspond to their commits or maintainer entry. If using a temporary email address, please be prepared to keep it alive at least until 2026-01-01 in case of technical issues. You will only be able to vote if you have a valid email in the voters file. If for whatever reason an automatically eligible voter can not open this PR using the corresponding GitHub account, please send us an email at elections@nixos.org. Same vote tallying system We will use OpaVote for vote tallying in addition to voting. We will use STV in order to fulfil the requirement of proportional-representation considerations, and we have chosen Meek STV as the specific version. Allowing questions to candidates before the candidate list is finalised We are opening candidate nominations and submission of questions at the same time. You may ask questions before all the candidates have been confirmed. You may mention specific candidate(s) in your question at any time after they have accepted their nomination. You don’t have to wait for any other step to be complete. Conflict of interest (CoI) handling The constitution disallows multiple people sharing the same CoI holding a seat on the SC immediately after the election. As the constitution does not forbid two candidates from sharing the same CoI, we may need to re-tally the votes until a group without shared CoIs is found. To allow verifiable re-tallying, we will make the anonymised list of ballots public. We reserve the right to use a local open-source Meek STV implementation in the case that re-tallying is necessary. Campaigning Election campaigning in official spaces is only allowed in applications and candidate Q&A - and in accordance to their format. Campaigning in any other official spaces, or not following the appropriate format, will be considered off-topic and removed. The EC and the moderation team have agreed to continue this practice from last year’s election. Timeline Description Start date End date Contribution window 2022-08-01T00:00:01 UTC 2026-08-01T00:00:01 UTC Candidate self-nominations, nominations, acceptances, and endorsements 2026-09-24 2026-10-14 Submission of questions from eligible voters to candidates 2026-09-24 2026-10-14 Exception requests 2026-09-24 2026-10-14 Candidates’ answers to the questions 2026-09-24 2026-10-14 Voting 2026-10-15 2026-11-01 Election Committee (EC) The EC is the temporary team to administer the election from start to finish. Its primary mission is to ensure legitimacy of the election. The election committee for this election consists of: @ners @RossComputerGuy @iamanaws For any questions, concerns or suggestions about this election, reach out to the election committee: by email: elections@nixos.org on GitHub: ping @NixOS/ec-2026 on Matrix: #sc-elections:nixos.org Best regards, the Election Committee The constitution defines substantial contributions as roughly corresponding to at least 25 commits ↩︎ 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic