In reply to @theophane:hufschmitt.net

Honestly: I don't know. My dream would be that we have a broad community consensus (as in: “everyone agrees that it's a good tradeoff between the different opinions”), but that's gonna be hard.

For the interim, something that has been raised a few times here and is probably a great (if painful for the organizers) is to publish a tentative sponsors list in advance so that people can raise issues in advance.

I personally don't feel that a broad community consensus is currently possible, at least - I have been involved in some efforts to that end, and it has become clear to me that we do not have a universal set of values across the community currently. maybe in the future that would be viable, but I expect that an attempt at 'total consensus' would currently stall.

regarding a tentative sponsors list as an interim: I cannot speak for others, of course, but personally I feel that that could work, as long as it is accompanied by a commitment that serious objections will be honoured. this is not perfect, but at least an improvement over the current situation.

one other option I can think of would be to frame it in terms of 'safety'; if there are people who consider the involvement of a sponsor a community safety problem (as is clearly the case in this instance, for example), for that to be sufficient grounds to reject the sponsor, even if that is not necessarily a majority view. this is again not perfect, but a significant improvement over the current situation

In reply to @theophane:hufschmitt.net
Also: the local NixCon (or other events) organizers have a say. I guess that for instance the next NixCon EU team will have strict policies any way. Which I hope should be acceptable for everyone (they organise it, it's their right to refuse sponsors af they don't think they are a fit)

In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
I would agree that organizers should generally be free to reject sponsors as they see fit. I would not extend that to the freedom to permit sponsors as they see fit, though, at least not as long as the conference is presented as a (semi-)official NixOS event, like is the case for NixCon

In reply to @theophane:hufschmitt.net
joepie91 🏳️‍🌈: what do you mean by "safety"?

In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
I would normally refer to a Code of Conduct defining that more clearly, but in our case we do not really have a CoC that does this to begin with, so that doesn't really work here. this is a difficult thing to define on the spot since it relies on a contextual understanding of what creates unsafe environments for people (marginalized folks in particular) that I'm not sure can be assumed here. I believe that there is a proposal to engage an outside expert on matters of community safety, and although I'm not familiar with the contents of their trainings, I expect that they will be able to convey a workable definition of 'community safety' for this purpose

In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
I can attempt to define what I, specifically, mean by 'community safety', of course, but I expect that that will end up being quite a lengthy conversation and I'm probably not the only one who wants to say things here :p

In reply to @aleksana:mozilla.org
The question is, who is included in the consensus? The foundation team? The people who contributed to NixOS organization? The people who have a discourse account? The people in this group or matrix space?

In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
I would normally refer to a Code of Conduct defining that more clearly, but in our case we do not really have a CoC that does this to begin with, so that doesn't really work here. this is a difficult thing to define on the spot since it relies on a contextual understanding of what creates unsafe environments for people (marginalized folks in particular) that I'm not sure can be assumed here. I believe that there is a proposal to engage an outside expert on matters of community safety, and although I'm not familiar with the contents of their trainings, I expect that they will be able to convey a workable definition of 'community safety' for this purpose

In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
Théophane: just to confirm: when a decision is made on the interim (interim interim?) policy, where will we be able to find the announcement? and what sort of timeline should we expect for that policy being formalized?