Talk:Oversight Board/Minutes

Comments regarding the 1 August 2008 meeting

WRT--second server-- We have had an offer to host some of our infrastructure at OSL[1]. Is this something we want to follow up on?

WRT--trade marks-- There appear to be two different reasons for registering and defending trademarks. 1. We want to be able to 'project' the Sugar brand by encouraging 'friends' to share and promote our brand as a measure of quality. 2. We want to be able to defend our brand against enemies who would hijack the brand by (a) misusing the name or (b) holding the name hostage.

At this point, we have no brand to defend;( 99% of the world knows Sugar as the GUI for OLPC. The general consensus of Open Source projects is that registering a trademark is not worth the time or effort at this point in a projects life cycle. We should revisit the issue again in six months.

WRT--Sugar availability-- Getting Sugar into open source advocates hands is critical.

One of the interesting metrics of projects is the 'Contributor Engagement Rate'. I am defining CER as the percent of users who actively contribute back to a project. Theses contributions can be in the form of word-of-mouth support, bug reports, bug fixes, and active development among other contributions. End user software such as Firefox has a low CER, most people just want to use the browser. As we shift towards developer software the CER tends to increase.

We are facing a similar situation with the target of OLPC deployments. It will be several years before the kids start contributing and the educators have limited experience engaging in the open source process. In the meantime, we can start priming the pump by engaging existing OSS developers and users.

WRT--Architect-- Designing the Sugar is not the problem. The problem is deciding on the designer.

One approach is the BDFL. But, I doubt that we could decide on a BD. Another approach is the Apache consensus model[2]. We need to give the oversight board the final authority and responsibility to plan Sugar's future.

The catch here will be selecting the initial oversight board to insure everyone's interest is represented. A possibility is 2 OLPC representatives, 2 RedHat representatives, 2 Sugar Labs representatives, and 1 neutral third party. Please note this is just a brainstorm.

WRT--LiveCD-- SkoleLinux has a live cd. I believe there was an attempt to put Sugar on a live Ubuntu variant. I think the developer chose Xubuntu, for space reasons, and then hacked the installer to load Sugar as the default.

The various derivative teams are getting _very_good_ at creating custom spins and liveCDs. If we can help get stable .deb and .rpm packages the spins will follow shortly.

Just some thoughts

from a 5 August 2008 email to the iaep list by dfarning