nix.dev/maintainers

Nix documentation team

The Nix documentation team was formed to flatten the infamous learning curve.

Goals

• ease learning, increase onboarding success and user retention
• improve organization of knowledge
• lead, guide, and support related community efforts

Motivation

To finally improve the state of affairs with Nix onboarding and documentation, we have to tackle some big issues and work through many small ones: implement structural changes after gathering the necessary social support; fix numerous little problems and help people get their contributions merged.

It appears that, so far, no one really had the time or resources required to do this consistently. The team is built around that limitation, and therefore organized as a praxicracy: you are in charge if and only if you get the work done. The team’s reason to exist is to make that principle discoverable and reproducible by laying groundwork and setting examples.

Members

• Valentin Gagarin (@fricklerhandwerk) (lead until 2022-10-31)

  Nix documentarian, Tweag

• Domen Kožar (@domenkozar)

  nix.dev author, Cachix

• Jörg Thalheim (@Mic92)

  NixOS Wiki maintainer

• Silvan Mosberger (@infinisil)

  nixpkgs maintainer, Tweag

Responsibilities

Team

Ordered by priority:

• establish and maintain guidelines for contributing to documentation
• extend and curate nix.dev as the central learning resource – long-term vision: The Nix Book
• review and merge Nix pull requests and Nixpkgs and NixOS pull requests concerning documentation
• keep track of Nix issues and nixpkgs and NixOS issues concerning documentation
• monitor the Documentation Discouse category
• monitor the Nix* Documentation Matrix room
• monitor changes to the NixOS Wiki

Team lead

• represent the team:
  • publish announcements and reports
  • keep team information up to date
• lead team meetings:
  • set the agenda
  • invite participants
  • announce meetings on the calendar
  • moderate and keep schedule
  • take and publish notes

Meeting protocol

The team holds bi-weekly meetings on Thursdays 17:30-18:30 (Europe/Berlin):

• NixOS calendar
• Discourse community calendar

The purpose of the meetings is to

• make strategic decisions
• coordinate efforts
• exchange experience and insights.

As the Nix community is distributed globally, available time for synchronous communication is highly limited and therefore very valuable. Writing is still the primary medium of communication.

To keep discussions highly focused and make their results accessible, we will:

• set meeting agendas on the team's GitHub project board from issues and pull requests
  • pull requests have priority, invite authors to the meetings
  • annotate estimated discussion time for each agenda item, it should be followed
• post meeting protocols on the Discourse documentation category
  • add notes to the respective issue or pull request as a comment
    • prepare notes collaboratively, e.g. in a HackMD scratchpad

Meeting notes should contain:

• date of meeting
• list of attendees
• results and links to GitHub comments for agenda item.

Contributing

If you want to help immediately, please see How to contribute to documentation.

Funding

This effort is sponsored by Tweag. @fricklerhandwerk will dedicate at least 15h/w from 2022-10 until at least 2022-10 towards improving Nix documentation.