Decision panels/SOAS

Overview
A 12-person Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoaS) decision panel was appointed by a September 25, 2009 Oversight Board decision.

The Oversight Board requested a final report, but none was received by 2009-12-04. The Oversight Board then assumed responsibility for deciding the mandated questions (ibid.). A summary is below.

Members

 * Sebastian Dziallas
 * Luke Faraone
 * Martin Dengler
 * Bill Bogstad
 * Faisal Khan
 * Benjamin M. Schwartz
 * Samuel Klein
 * Sean Daly
 * Tabitha Roder
 * Caryl Bigenho
 * Daniel Drake
 * Abhishek Indoria

Procedures
The Decision Panel procedures were adopted.

Discussion took place on the SoaS mailing list with subject lines beginning with the text "[DP]".

Conclusion
In the absence of a final report  the Oversight board decided Question 1, Question 2, and Question 3:

Further ideas

 * discussion of potential naming conventions.
 * discussion of how to support products such as SOAS, and what that means
 * exploration of what it means to "produce a distribution", which some active contributors felt was a huge effort and others felt was already being done, with most effort happening upstream. Better agreement within the community about what is being done may help avoid distracting meta-debates about direction.