On Wed, Feb 18 2026, Sergio Pastor Pérez wrote: > I'm not sure we share the same goal here. The idea was not to impose > anything on anyone, but to allow unexperienced people to > participate.
The nature of the GCD process is that we're not imposing - we're making a decision together. By design a GCD can be vetoed by anyone, so the only way for a GCD to go through is for everyone to at least accept it. > Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what you say, I understand that you > don't take part on the different unofficial communication channels. I'm in a Guix XMPP room, and I have been active on the r/guix subreddit in the past. > And in my experience, the conversations that take place in different > unofficial platforms cannot take place in the official mediums we > promote, because they don't provide the technical features that those > conversations require, being it images, audio, video calls, polls, > etc. I just looked at the last week of XMPP messages in the Guix room that I'm in, and of the non-text messages there were two images (screenshots of code) and one attached file (an archive with some .scm files). Looking at the first page of r/guix at the moment I see three images in total, two of which don't contribute substantially to the post (IMO). My experience has been that text is a sufficient medium for almost all the communication that I want to do around Guix. I'm curious to know what you're seeing that needs audio and video calls, or polls. I legitimately don't feel the need for them, but I'm aware that I've probably internalised the limitations of the platforms I use. I will also note that audio and video calls exacerbate one of the issues we talked about earlier, with the sync/async communication. Even if the async communication is there, if calls are commonplace then people in further away time zones (like me) can find it even harder to engage. > No, you are reading me wrong. What I meant is that, if at the present > time, trying to do the drastic change of switching completely to Zulip > is unrealistic, what I wanted to do is to try to make a space for Guile > projects to collaborate together, and try to bring members from the > different unofficial communities to the Zulip instance, to at least see > if it helps us with gathering all this help information that newcomers > get scattered across different media. I'm not sure how to interpret this, so let me state my understanding of the options and you can tell me where I'm misunderstanding things. 1. We can create a new unofficial medium for people to talk about Guix and Guile projects. This does not require consensus from anyone, but needs to attract people to it "organically" in order to become useful. 2. We can create a new official medium for people to talk about Guix and Guile projects. This requires a GCD, but would immediately become useful to the whole project. My understanding is that you want to go with (1). If that's right, then how does this plan differ from the other unofficial Guix communities? Your long-term vision may be to turn it into an official Guix community, but in the short term I don't see much difference. > If this is successful and we manage to centralize most of the unofficial > conversations through that Zulip instance, then we can start writing a > GCD. Doing things in this order is tricky, because building consensus may require compromise, and changing the plan. If there's already an established community, then you have a lot less opportunity to change things to build that consensus. It might be that people agree "we want to use Zulip, but we want Guix to make its own organisation and do things differently". Then what do you do? Of particular note here is that official Guix communication channels are moderated by Guix maintainers, who enforce the code of conduct. Completely changing moderators of a community seems like a big change, but it would have to happen if Guix were to officially "adopt" an existing community space. > I think any GCD before other members understand the platform does not > make sense. I agree it would be wise to set something up that lets people understand the platform before asking them to make a decision, but establishing a functioning community capable of supporting newcomers isn't a prerequisite for that. As mentioned above, I think it's actually counterproductive. To provide a model of what I mean: while the Codeberg migration GCD was being discussed, Ludovic set up a personal Guix repository on Codeberg. This let people raise PRs and see how it worked. After the GCD was accepted, a new Codeberg repository was created for Guix to use. Note also that most of this email hasn't mentioned Zulip. I don't think the particular choice of technology is all that relevant to the core issue here. I think the core issue is really about how to enact change in the Guix community. Carlo
