Nest administrator elections were a glorified popularity contest

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— Noam Chomsky

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So, I’m an administrator on the secondary-schooler ran tilde called Nest. This post reflects my own values as an individual and not the rest of the administration team. In April of 2025, the initial admin team was formed by STV elections where 5 of us were chosen. We planned to run elections every year around April to replace the 5 admin seats.

This year (2025) was different. Over 800 users were signed up to Nest and we were running admin elections again. We opened self-nominations through Quetzal (the account management bot) where you could type a 150-character blurb about yourself and people could vote for you after it closed. People were campaigning and rallying people behind them. On one paw, you’d see this as good as people have admins they like. On the other, people don’t have to be qualified to be selected.

The issues with the candidates#

One person was removed for being very toxic. Another was removed for harassment of others. We then started cutting based on the last time they’ve logged in and amount of messages they sent in Slack (specifically the #nest channel). It started to become more and more arbitrary based on factors which were not made available to the public. Basically, it was an application process with extra steps.

Then, people started to joke around about leaking user data. And those people were very popular. Nest takes data privacy very seriously. We act as the data processor for people’s projects.

The solution#

We moved to applications. We asked a few questions:

1.What is your experience with Linux system administration? 2.What contributions have you made to the Hack Club community? 3.What technical project that you have made are you most proud of? 4.What other relevant skills do you have? 5.What would you want to add to or change about Nest? 6.Do you have a project that currently runs on #nest?

We probably could’ve done applications from the start since this isn’t the type of things you would want to elect. Nest isn’t a political office where you choose people based on the policies they want to enact. We need people who actually know what they’re doing.

Elections in communities are not bad, they just don’t work for everything. And, that’s okay. You just need to find a different way to represent the community.