Org owner rotation

[wolfgangwalther]

All important teams/bodies have some kind of membership policy or are planning to have one. The SC is elected, the board has terms of two years according to the constitution, nixpkgs committers are nominated, approved and automatically retired, the nixpkgs core team is still working on their membership policy.

However, I couldn't find anything about org owners in the relevant docs. Are org owners appointed for life? Are they automatically rotated after some time? I think there were changes in the past, but I'm not sure on which grounds.

Practically speaking, org owners responsibilities include:

Receive and process requests.

Of course, I only have limited insight, but my subjective perspective / experience is, that we currently have about 2 or maybe 2 1/2 active org owners. @infinisil and @winterqt are regularly doing stuff and helping out. I have also seen @Lassulus do things, but as the 1-man-moderation team it's probably hard right now. I have not seen any org owner things / requests processed by @zimbatm - and I'll have to be honest, I had to look up the 5th org owner, because I had no idea that @tomberek was one, too.

Especially for things that might require another org owner approval, the current situation effectively requires 100% of active org owners to deal with a case.

I think it's unfair to put all the load of dealing with org owner things on Silvan and Winter's shoulders. I'm asking the @NixOS/steering committee to maybe rotate the org owners a bit, to have the load distributed - and cases handled faster. Ideally, the SC could also formulate a policy around this, how to do this regularly or so.

[philiptaron]

<Just me hat on>

I'd like to have you, @wolfgangwalther, as an org owner because of how much you've impacted Nixpkgs CI through deep knowledge and engagement with GitHub's API. I trust you to act with both alacrity and care.

[wolfgangwalther]

I'd like to have you, @wolfgangwalther, as an org owner because of how much you've impacted Nixpkgs CI through deep knowledge and engagement with GitHub's API. I trust you to act with both alacrity and care.

Thank you, but I'll have to decline. I believe individuals should not hold too much power. I am already member of the core team, I don't think I should also be an org owner.

Additionally, I fear that I might be too reactive as an org owner, too eager to implement stuff and possibly in some cases not asking other org owners or the SC for approvals, even when I should. You trust me more than I do myself. :)

[cafkafk]

I believe individuals should not hold too much power.

Where do you cut the line between complete outsider and too much power? I'd already consider SC membership to be too much power for an org owner for day-to-day, and should only be allowed for contingency.

I'd consider preparing a proposal for policy for rotating these, but if you have any insight on what you're looking for here, I'd gladly hear it.

[wolfgangwalther]

Where do you cut the line between complete outsider and too much power? I'd already consider SC membership to be too much power for an org owner for day-to-day, and should only be allowed for contingency.

My request here is mostly about getting active org owners, not about the "too much power" question.

Too much power only came up when discussing myself. I had the same thing to say about my own nomination for SC, while on core.

[philiptaron]

The roles and responsibilities of org owners are spelled out more crisply and forthrightly than any other team. I remain in disagreement with @wolfgangwalther about whether he'd gain too much power having both those roles, and consider him a perfect candidate, both from a desire-to-adhere-to-rules perspective and a responsiveness, doing-the-job standpoint.

[wolfgangwalther]

Even if everyone, hypothetically, agreed that I would make a good org owner: I don't want to. I'm sure there are other good candidates.