Give Nix maintainers access to an Open Collective project

[fricklerhandwerk]

The @NixOS/nix-team would like to have a budget to spend on supporting our work.

Proposal

• Open an Open Collective project under the NixOS collective
• Grant write and spend permissions to at least one member of @NixOS/nix-team (not counting @NixOS/foundation board members)

Rationale

We're time constrained and our primary responsibility is to guide Nix development, not necessarily carry it out. We're already fully booked with driving design decisions as a team, as well as working on incremental improvements individually. Many types of changes are very unlikely to ever be implemented by volunteers. Usually these are exactly those which would make volunteer contributions easier to make and to accept, such as increasing test coverage, reducing build times, or improving code factoring and readability.

Related: NixOS/nix#8431

Having our own budget to spend on work being done to implement agreed-upon solutions to well-known problems would contribute to our mission. It would also be an opportunity to set examples for other (future) community teams and grow our collective organisational experience.

We can of course open our own Open Collective. But we're an official community team, and should show up as such in public. The @NixOS/documentation-team also has an official project on Open Collective, and has set good precedence for making things happen that otherwise would not have.

At least one team member who is not @edolstra or @thufschmitt should have write access to that project so we're not bottle-necked on foundation board members, who are known to be Very Busy People.

This proposal was discussed in and approved by the @NixOS/nix-team. The general issue of providing funding for technical work was also discussed on various occasions with @edolstra, @zimbatm, and @domenkozar, who requested a written proposal for deliberation. @tomberek and me are available to drive the process.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-10-23-nix-team-meeting-minutes-97/34561/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-52/38343/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/is-summer-of-nix-worth-the-money/43856/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2024-06-13-nix-teams-gathering-meeting-minutes/46976/1