The Nixpkgs core team has been tasked by the Steering Committee to provide leadership for Nixpkgs as a whole and to take delegated responsibility for its governance.

We aim to maintain and strengthen the existing bottom‐up consensus model of Nixpkgs and NixOS development, while establishing lightweight structure to address the pain points we’ve seen ourselves: empowering the people doing the work while upholding the project values, helping resolve disagreements and conflicting priorities between different parts of the project, and acting as technical steering to focus energy for wide‐scale work.

We aim to be responsive and transparent. We intend to operate on consensus to the greatest extent possible, and don’t want this to become a full‐time job – we all intend to continue being highly involved with ground‐level work, and think it’s vital for the team’s success to not have members choose between their contributions and a heavyweight governance role.