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Oversight Board/Meeting Minutes-2025-09-17

From Sugar Labs

Sept 17 2025 Meeting

Attending

  • Devin Ulibarri (SL Inc. board)
  • Walter Bender (SL Inc. board)
  • Samson Goddy (SL In. board)
  • Sebastian Silva (SL Inc. board)
  • Sumit Srivastava (SL Inc. board)
  • Krish -- MostlyK (community member)
  • Safwan Sayeed (community member)
  • Om Santosh Suneri (community member)
  • Ibiam (community member)

Absent

  • Claudia Urrea (SL Inc. board)

Agenda

  • GSoC/DMP/SSoC report
  • AWS and infra report
  • Election discussion
  • Briefly highlight FSF40 participation
  • GNOME governance

GSoC/DMP/SSoC Report

AWS and infra report

MostlyK: We are on the verge of merging a CI/CD pipeline for Sugar-AI, there were some issues of API taking too long, which I have fixed by increasing the timeout from nginx server. So now that 504 would be gone. Everything else was running smoothly in AWS. I am although not sure how our credits/cost is looking or if this is sustainable. [Our current burnrate is about US$ 1500 per month.] We are also getting some weird people requesting for API for absolutely horrible description on their usage so it's good we have a system to deny API keys. Devin: Our credits:
Total amount remaining
$4,696.33
Total amount used
$1,803.67
Expiration date of 08/31/2026 All: We should reopen the investigation into the tradeoff of self-hosting models.

Election discussion

Walter, Claudia, and Samson's positions are opening up. We need to hold a new election. (Safwan held up his hand.)

Last year:

FSF40 participation

Governance

See https://discourse.gnome.org/t/rfc-governance/30738

MostlyK: GNOME's past informal governance was a system of "project fiefdoms," where individual maintainers had immense authority over their respective codebases. While this allowed for quick, independent development in the project's early days, it became a major liability as GNOME grew. The lack of a formal body to set project-wide priorities and resolve cross-project disagreements caused fragmentation and contributor burnout. This "benevolent dictator" model ultimately proved unsustainable, forcing them to seek a more scalable and collaborative structure. They are still in the process of making this change, but the motivation for it is clear: they need a way to grow without falling apart.

While our project isn't the size of GNOME, we can learn from their experience to strengthen our own amazing community. Our biweekly(well now weekly) meetings and board meeting discussions are a major strength, providing a consistent forum for community consensus and communication. We've got a great foundation.

To make things even better, we can adopt some of GNOME's principles to help us make decisions faster and get more done. By setting clear six-month goals for projects like they had GNOME 49 for this summer , like a focused summer of code . We can align our efforts and ensure that our discussions lead to tangible work. Empowering dedicated teams for areas like Music Blocks and the main website would allow them to make quick decisions and drive their work forward, while our broader meetings can focus on celebrating successes and guiding our collective vision for Sugar which we all anyways do.

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