Decision panels

Decision panels are defined in the Sugar Labs governance documents as temporary bodies set up to study a specific controversial or politically sensitive issue, and produce a report about their conclusions as a recommendation to the Oversight Board. They are formed by a decision of the Oversight Board, generally after a call for volunteers, and given specific topics and questions to address.

Ben on the origins of the idea

Ben wrote about this during its initial discussion:

As the instigator of this Decision Panel business, I should attempt to clarify the idea. My goal is to make serving on the Oversight Board as unappealing as possible. Ideally, it should be _difficult_ to find seven people willing to serve on the Oversight Board. As such, the document specifies that members of the Oversight Board _cannot_ decide controversial issues. It also specifies that members of the Oversight Board _must_ act as secretaries, taking minutes for every meeting of every committee. Oversight Board members are also prohibited from voting in any of the committee meetings, even though they must attend to take minutes (that's been part of the draft from the beginning). I hope this will be a very frustrating experience for members of the Oversight Board.

I am a firm believer that the worst people to give power are those who want it. The Oversight Board, as described so far, has the responsibility of keeping Sugar Labs running smoothly, but almost no power to decide the interesting issues. This makes me very happy, as the Oversight Board is therefore most likely to attract people who are interested only in keeping Sugar Labs running, not pushing a particular personal agenda, even a technical agenda. My hope is that people will be elected based on a history of being calm, focused, personable, and reasonable, not on the basis of any platform (they don't have the power to execute it) or technical knowledge (they can't use it).

I would much rather keep the technical experts _out_ of governance until a technical decision must be made that requires domain-specific expert knowledge. Most technical decisions should be made on the mailing lists anyway; only issues that must be decided in order for work to continue, and on which the community is otherwise deadlocked, should be escalated to a Decision Panel. I expect the Oversight Board to be concerned almost exclusively with the mundane details of managing finances and partnerships, making sure the communications channels are open, etc. I do not want the Oversight Board to be a Court of Last Resort.

I still favor the presence of the Decision Panels section in the draft, but that's not surprising. I see it as an easy lightweight system for moving political issues away from the Oversight Board. I welcome other perspectives.

List of decision panels

• SOAS : A [[Decision panels/SOAS|decision panel about SOAS] was requested at the September 25, 2009 SLOB meeting, and asked to answer four questions.