Oversight Board/2010/Meeting Minutes-2010-01-22

Finances

1. Quick status report
2. Background on our various projects
3. Q and (perhaps some) A

Infrastructure

New server

This is a request to pre-approve the budget for a fast machine with 8 cores to run some of our primary services: wiki, trac, aslo, lists. These services are currently running on solarsail and sunjammer, both of which are insufficiently powerful to support the current growth in traffic.

If we successfully obtain donated servers from the Wikimedia foundation (see below), we may keep going a while more without this expense. Ivan is also planning to purchase a new server for his personal use, which he'll make available on friendly terms as he has done for solarsail.

Motion: Authorize Bernie to purchase a new server. The cost should not exceed US$ 3000.

Wikipedia servers

As discussed in the latest InfraTeam meeting, we will try to get 3 machines to RIT (pending approval on their side) and the rest to Boston and Washington DC. Luke Faraone has a few contacts of organizations which would be able to rack the machines for us.

These boxes are old and possibly not very reliable. They would make a good basis for clustering ASLO if we're careful to make every component of the cluster redundant and implement proper automatic takeover. David Farning and Aleksey Lim produced a cluster prototype which needs some more tuning and testing.

Clustering ASLO is something that we could postpone by 1-2 years (at current growth rate) if we purchased a modern machine which would be 8-10 times faster than our current hardware. However, this project opens valuable collaboration opportunities with RIT and other partners.

Motion: Authorize Luke to ship some used hardware from the Wikipedia Foundation (12 servers) to various hosting sites. The cost should not exceed US$300.

Trademark

Background

Goals and scope

We are working on completing and ratifying a trademark policy for the Sugar Labs marks, which are held by the SFC on behalf of SL. This policy will have to be approved by the SFLC before it becomes legally binding; once it does, it will affect the following marks when used in a Sugar Labs context:

• Sugar Labs (trademark registered)
• Sugar on a Stick (trademark in the process of being registered)
• Sugar Labs Partner
• Sugar Ready
• Sugar Learning Platform
• Sugar

Current status

We currently have no ratified trademark policy. We have been using Sugar_Labs/Governance/Trademark as our guide on individual cases in the interim. The current draft of our trademark policy is available at Talk:Sugar_Labs/Governance/Trademark#Sugar_Trademark_Policy.

Prior decisions

We have passed several trademark-related decisions in the interim that may be affected by our policy ratification decision.

• MOTION: Yes, "Sugar on a Stick" should be reserved by Sugar Labs for use by the SoaS-Fedora distribution so that Sugar can be marketed effectively, until such time when a trademark policy, agreement, and process is put in place: SoaS will be the first project to go through that process.
• The upcoming Sugar on a Stick release, which will be a Fedora 13 spin, is approved to use the Sugar on a Stick name.

References and resources

We have been drawing inspiration from how other open source projects have written their trademark policies.

• Fedora secondary trademark usage guidelines
• Fedora guidelines on mark usage for distribution of Fedora software in combinatio n with modified or non-Fedora software
• Fedora business website trademark guidelines
• Fedora Remix guidelines)
• OpenSUSE Trademark and Remix Guidelines
• using the "Linux" trademark

Discussion points

• From the point of view of Marketing, is this trademark policy legally tight enough to prevent abuse?
• What does the process look like from the perspective of a trademark requestee (walk through a case study)? How much work-time and wait-time do we predict such a requestee will have to budget for the process, and is this acceptable? What steps can we take, or amendments can we make to the draft proposal, to reduce that cost even further?
• Do we agree on the wording of the preamble as a human-readable introduction to "the legal stuff"?
• The idea of having a trademark secretary to act as a point of contact throughout the process.
  • Technical setup: Have "trademark AT sugarlabs DOT org" set up as an email alias that sends the message to iaep with a [trademark] tag.
  • Logistical setup: The trademark secretary would be responsible for responses to all emails with that tag, as part of their duties. Other duties would include answering queries on trademark policy as set by SLOBs (typically via email, as described above), acting as a guide/coach/advocate to parties requesting trademark usage and assisting them in putting motions on the topic before SLOBs, and maintaining public records so that all can track relevant SLOBs decisions on the matter.
  • Governance setup: The trademark secretary would be an interim appointed position until the next election cycle (fall), at which time if we decide it has been useful and wish to make it a regular appointed position (like ombudsman and treasurer), we can.

Motion

To be called when the discussion is over, and there is general consensus that the trademark policy draft is ready:

MOTION: Approve the trademark policy listed at LINK.

MOTION: To appoint NAME as trademark secretary until the next election/appointment cycle, to be responsible for answering queries on trademark policy as set by SLOBs, acting as a guide/coach/advocate to parties requesting trademark usage and assisting them in putting motions on the topic before SLOBs, and maintaining public records so that all can track relevant SLOBs decisions on the matter.

Followup

The following action items need to be taken by somebody.

• #action Clean up the wiki pages to reflect this discussion, making any redirects needed to clarify that all prior draft work has been pulled into the current, SLOBs-ratified trademark policy. Note on the policy page that the policy is pending approval by the SFLC.
• #action Notify the community of the trademark ratification via the usual means (iaep with a [SLOBs] tag, Planet).
• #action Forward the trademark policy to the SFLC for approval; check in on progress next week.
• #action Perform any necessary follow-up with the parties involved in related #Prior decisions to ensure past decisions are brought up to date to be compliant with the current (newly ratified) policy. In particular, start SoaS through the trademark approval process.

Goals for 2010

Proposed 2010 goals for Sugar Labs (very rough first pass)

1. Release Sucrose 0.88 and 0.90 in order to provide a more useful and stable learning platform for deployments and developers
   1. Release Sucrose 0.88 in March
   2. Release Sucrose 0.90 in November
   3. Deliver a product that has been well tested for usability and accessibility needs
   4. Make successful launches with great marketing campaigns
   5. Promote corresponding SoaS releases with Fedora
   6. Make progress on a REL-based release of Sugar
2. Make Sugar the learning platform of choice for 2010
   1. Support existing local user groups (e.g., local Sugar Labs) and work to create new ones
   2. Have SL representation at major free software and education events
   3. Establish relationship with third-party solution providers to help them understand the benefits of Sugar
   4. Work with other learning programs that complement our efforts
3. Explore Sugar in the context of mobile devices and web-based services
4. Make Sugar Labs the place for working on learning-related technologies
   1. Provide forums for teachers and developers to collaborate
   2. Demonstrate leadership by providing great tools for the appropriation and application of knowledge
   3. Always ask: how does this impact the learning
5. Eat our own dogfood
   1. Promote free software
   2. Be transparent and open to critique
   3. Encourage new people to join our project

Future issues to address

None immediately, as of now - Oversight_Board/Minutes may provide some inspiration. Please add topics to the list if they come up.