Nix SC election 2025

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 substantial¹ way may reach out to the EC.

• 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 canditate template
• Receive sufficient endorsements to become a candidate

Please read the linked documentation for in-depth descriptions of the process.

How to ask questions of candidates and nominees

Any eligible voter can create an issue using the Candidate Question template.

Note that nominees can answer questions even before they have received sufficient endorsements to become candidates.

Questions can be aimed at specific candidates or nominees, but may be answered by any candidate or nominee.

After the question has been posted, only candidates and nominees can respond to it.

Timeline

Description	Start date	End date
Contribution window	2021-08-01T00:00:01 UTC	2025-08-01T00:00:01 UTC
Candidate self-nominations, nominations, acceptances, and endorsements	2025-09-14	2025-09-30
Submission of questions from eligible voters to candidates	2025-09-14	2025-10-03
Exception requests	2025-09-14	2025-10-11
Candidates' answers to the questions	2025-09-14	2025-10-11
Voter registration (for inclusion in the initial OpaVote upload)	2025-09-14	2025-10-14
Voting	2025-10-15	2025-11-01

We will make an effort to regularly, once per 3 days or more often, upload the later registrations to OpaVote, but this will be manual and not in real time»

Voting end date is 2025-11-01 Anywhere on Earth (AoE, UTC-12), which is the most delayed timezone. This means if your (local) clock shows 2025-11-01 or an earlier date you can still vote. If your (local) clock shows 2025-11-02 (one day after the end date) you may still be able to vote but you will have to compare timezones² to be sure.

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
• @7c6f434c
• @RossComputerGuy

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-2025
• on Matrix: #sc-elections:nixos.org

Footnotes

1. The constitution defines substantial contributions as roughly corresponding to at least 25 commits ↩

2. env TZ=Etc/GMT+12 date --rfc-3339=s will give you the relvevant AoE time and date. As long as the date portion still displays 2025-11-01 or earlier this means you can still vote. Any time left before the following day (2025-11-02) is the time left for voting. ↩