https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is: Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
He is not wrong though.
Number aside, if you have a hard requirement that in a committee board there should be someone from a minority then you will end in a situation where the committee perform worse because the “forced” member has no merit to be in, or at least it is an very high probability.
Ah, the common strawman. A committee where everyone thinks pretty much the same is somehow better than one where a few have a different opinion?
Such discussions took place decades ago when pretty much every manager was only male. And they often honestly thought they did the right thing. When there were more women forced to be managers the group as a whole got better insights into different opinions. Which helped to see that certain things could be done a different way.
That to me is history, plus rather logical.
Having a few people with different opinions is further usually good for a committee. Though some like every single person to think the same, more efficient or something. If most think the same it’s way easier to overlook something.
Sometime yes, sometime not.
It all depend on the context. The direction of a project ? Then maybe the fact that the committee has at least roughly the same vision is a good thing, it keep the project focused and progressing, as long as there is a way to offer suggestions.
A political group ? Then it is better to have more points of view, as long as you can decide something in the end.
There is not a single best solution.
On the other hand I can point to examples where when a woman, to stay within your example, were put in charge the result were disastrous, so what ?
Maybe if we start to think that being in some groups does not inherently make you a better candidate to something than we will start to solve the problem.
As long as they know what they are talking about yes, else it is just stupid.
The point of all this discussion is that Jon Ringer objected to have an hard requirement for one person in the committee need to be from a minority, which honestly is not that stupid thing to say.
The argument isn’t that they’re better, but that having a wider range of opinions and perspectives within the leadership group improves it more than a strictly merit-based approach would.
Do you realiza that “wider range of opinions and perspectives” does not means “hard requirement for a person from a minority” in a leadership position, right ?
Yes, I wasn’t arguing that this plan was correct. Just that you misinterpreted the intent.