Oversight Board/2008/Log-2008-07-18

irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

2008.07.18 17:00UTC

(Alas, I managed to lose the very beginning of the log file... --Walter 20:19, 18 July 2008 (UTC))

<marcopg> cjb is on the board for olpc right?

<marcopg> so the members are finalized?

<walter> I haven't heard back from Karen if she agrees to represent SFC

<walter> The document is on the wiki now:

<walter> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/SFC-SugarLabs_Agreement

<walter> CJB is the OLPC rep.

<tomeu> cjb is traveling to 1cc

<walter> I compiled an initial membership list so that we can hold an election.

<tomeu> he wanted to make to this meeting

<walter> I tried to be inclusive of all the Sugar contributors and anyone who spoke up recently.

<walter> I think it is fair and reasonable place to start from

<walter> I'd like to use Mako's tool (http://selectricity.media.mit.edu/) to hold an election...

<bemasc> we don't have SJ; I suppose he is still in Egypt

<cjb> Hello! Sorry I'm late.

<walter> We can let any member nominate candidates for the various committees and then vote for up to n people, where n is the size of the committee

<marcopg> (reading)

<bemasc> (SJ had a number of distinctive things to say about the voting/committee system)

<walter> I've not heard any of them, nor seen any comments posted in the governance pages...

<walter> Can you talk him into sharing his ideas more publicly?

<walter> (We don't bite)

<bemasc> I will try

<marcopg> can't see anything bad in the agreement, but I'm not a lawyer :)

<walter> I trust Mako's judgment in process...

<erikos> marcopg, you are the representative of us devs?

<marcopg> not sure actually, I guess

<marcopg> erikos: not that this board is only temporary

<marcopg> one will be elected

<marcopg> (when?)

<walter> Re the agreement, the concern I had was pretty simple: it is an agreement about being an ope-source project, which is fine, but Sugar Labs is really about a different set of goals, of which FOSS is a principle means

<walter> I hope we can hold the election in August

<tomeu> walter: we may not be able to do all we want to do in one single organization

<erikos> marcopg, don't really understood your comment

<marcopg> erikos: I mean the current members of the board are temporary

<marcopg> erikos: the real board will be elected, hopefully in August

<erikos> marcopg, ok

<marcopg> dfarning: !

<walter> Simon, please nominate lots of developers!!

<erikos> dfarning, hello!

<dfarning> Hello all

<walter> Dave, I'll be posing the log of what you've missed so far...

<erikos> walter, that could be elected you mean?

<erikos> walter, i guess that was the list you talked about earlier

<walter> I hope we get a good set of nominations that represent all aspects of the community.... then we will elect from there...

<marcopg> walter: are you trying to address that concern with Karen?

<bemasc> walter: "any software distributed by the Project will be distributed solely as Free Software" is certainly a striking statement, but given the makeup of the Sugar Labs community I don't think it represents a meaningful restriction

<erikos> walter, sounds good

<walter> I think the FOSS nature of the Conservancy is not an issue for us...

<walter> We won't restrict, but rather will encourage other organizations to grow up around us

<walter> They can build upon Sugar in different ways...

<bemasc> sounds good

<tomeu> ok, any other issue people can think of?

<marcopg> walter: so you are basically happy with the document you posted? Just waiting for Karen to signoff?

<walter> We should decide on initial committees before the election

<walter> I think the basic relationship with SFC and the governance model are in reasonably good shape

<cjb> Is there any (personal) financial liability we should be worried about, or anything like that?

<walter> I think we are cool re liability, but I will check with Karen. (I think this is one way we are immediately helped by the SFC)

<cjb> (It doesn't sound like it, but it's my first time on a board, not sure what our responsibilities are.)

<walter> We aren't really the "board" since there will be a board for the SFC.

<cjb> I see.

<walter> We are an advisory group.

<walter> But I will check with Karen whether we need some liability insurance of some sort...

<walter> Something to add to the budget if necessary

<walter> She told me that she'd be back with any final edits sooner than later...

<walter> As you may recall, we already have provisional acceptance into the conservancy

<walter> And I haven't heard any negative feedback from the community.

<cjb> I don't think I have any comments on the free software clause. Most of Sugar (the parts that might be extended) is LGPL, so it's legal for someone else to link e.g. a proprietary activity to it. I'm happy with the statement that Sugar Labs won't do that, though.

<walter> I agree.

<marcopg> yeah +1

<bemasc> it all sounds like it's going well

<cjb> (Even if I did have comments, maybe I'd have to run them by OLPC to check they reflected OLPC's opinion first ;-)

<walter> I am only concerned that the project not be seen so narrowly as just a FOSS project.

<cjb> *nod* It sounds like the biggest problem, then, is "A":

<cjb> > The purpose of the Project is to produce and distribute and support the use of software [..]

<walter> Please do make sure that the OLPC crowd is comfortable with what we are doing

<bemasc> right

<cjb> can we think of a redefinition to suggest?

<bemasc> are we allowed to change it?

<tomeu> "support" makes it quite broad

<cjb> bemasc: we should certainly be allowed to propose a change.

<bemasc> cjb: true

<walter> I added the support the use of language...

<bemasc> my view is that this line is in fact a true statement. It just places the emphasis in a slightly wrong way.

<walter> not usually part of their agreements...

<bemasc> walter: oh, that's very good

<cjb> walter: I'll either write a individual report for OLPC, or make sure the minutes get seen with some commentary if any is necessary.

<walter> So, everyone OK with this? We can await final feedback from Karen and OLPC?

<marcopg> I am ok

<bemasc> I don't think we should worry about people getting the wrong idea about Sugar labs from reading our Sponsorship Agreement

<cjb> What sort of activities can Sugar Labs do that aren't based around producing software?

<tomeu> if the software is towards education, support is *really* broad

<bemasc> cjb: curricula

<cjb> bemasc: Ah! Maybe "content" is a missing word?

<cjb> e.g. "The purpose of the Project is to produce and distribute and support the use of software and content"

<tomeu> that may work quite well

<walter> Personally, I think Sugar Labs itself is not doing the content distribution and support, but it is hard to draw a line between software and content these days.

<bemasc> I don't really care how accurate this document is. No one who wants to know what we're all about is going to look for the answer here.

<marcopg> sound like with content it would cover pretty much everything we can do

<marcopg> walter: right

<walter> That would be an example of an affiliated effort.

<cjb> bemasc: I'm asking partly because I don't already know the answer to "What does Sugar Labs want to do?".

<walter> Like OLPC Nepal'

<cjb> And while it's not necessary to agree in a legal document, it's at least a good idea to make sure we all understand.

<bemasc> I can hardly see any disagreement between the SFC and us, philosophically, regardless of how we phrase this, so I am not concerned.

<walter> I think Sugar Labs wants to support the engineering and learning communities

<walter> again, FOSS is an important (and non-controversial) means

<cjb> bemasc: the question I'd ask is, can you see disagreement between us and us?

<tomeu> well, we can support the software by producing content

<bemasc> cjb: certainly, I can disagreement within myself about what Sugar Labs should be... and that's fine. We're friendly people around here, so disagreements of this sort do not worry me either.

<marcopg> walter: do we support member of the community which does closed content?

<walter> Or support the meta process of developing content.

<walter> I think we only support non-FOSS in being a project in which people and draw from for their own purposes

<cjb> bemasc: sure. but that disagreement means this conversation is worth having even if the piece of paper it ultimately produces is not particularly.

<bemasc> ok

<walter> But I cannot imagine a scenario where we'd directly support a non-FOSS effort

<marcopg> walter: that sounds good

<bemasc> marcopg: a very interesting question. How about "we will take efforts to assist creators of non-free content only to the degree that those efforts seem likely to assist creators of free content".

<walter> If that were to be the case, we'd have to leave the Conservancy

<walter> I think it is an unlikely scenario, so we should probably cross that bridge only when we come to it.

<marcopg> yeah

<cjb> Yeah. I don't think any of this needs to go into the document.

<tomeu> but then, probably should be a partner organization to do that

<cjb> Can we think of other things Sugar Labs might want to do that aren't directly creating software or content?

<cjb> For example, do we want to.. fly educators in to hold workshops, things like that?

<tomeu> I see that clearly in support

<marcopg> cjb: that's supporting learning right? so I'd say yet

<marcopg> yes

<walter> Maybe we should jump to Topic 3 for a moment

<cjb> Righto.

<bemasc> there are a lot of things that we may want to do, such as provide professional support to people deploying Sugar, but many of these things may end up easiest to do outside Sugar Labs itself.

<walter> I think Sugar Labs is about bringing the best of engineering and learning together

<walter> fostering that community around a vision

<walter> I hope lots of "for profit" enterprise grows up around Sugar

<walter> but Sugar Labs is the glue that keeps these efforts working towards the same goal

<tomeu> ok, we can push those conflicts out from sugar labs, is that?

<tomeu> the same people can be involved, it just doesn't need to happen inside the sugar labs umbrella

<walter> Not sure what conflicts you are referring to

<tomeu> walter: in case we want to do something not in the stated goals of the project

<walter> but yes, just as there can be multiple licenses for code, people can have multiple goals and affilations

<walter> But the Sugar Labs focus must stay clear or we'll never get anything done

<bemasc> speaking of which, I think we're happy enough with this document to move on.

<walter> +1

<walter> So...

<walter> Any concerns re membership except the ones we hope to hear from SJ?

<erikos> only concern is that i can not access the page

<walter> I don't think we have much representation from educators yet, but there is some...

<walter> (Mako's page is down, but the list in the wiki should be accessible)

<erikos> walter, where is the list again?

<tomeu> uy teachers look quite active in the sur ml

<bemasc> cjl: selectricity.org is up

<walter> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/initial_members_list

<erikos> thanks!

<walter> the link in Mako's blog was wrong.... I've updated the link to .org

<erikos> yup have it now

<walter> I'll take a first pass at creating the vote structure and report back

<tomeu> ok

<bemasc> so... committees?

<marcopg> walter: do we need to setup a way for people to request membership?

<walter> I don't think it needs to be too complicated

<marcopg> before the elections that would be

<marcopg> otherwise it seems like *we* designated the members

<marcopg> (in GNOME it works that way)

<walter> The membership committee can handle members, but we had to start somewhere.

<bemasc> Gentoo accomplishes something like this by requiring that new developers be sponsored by existing developers.

<walter> I've been soliciting on the lists for members and got quite a few that way, so I think the word is out

<bemasc> but yes, the solution is to create membership committee so we don't have to think about it

<walter> +1

<marcopg> if you all think this is fine for the first election I'm ok

<erikos> bemasc, the membership committee?

<bemasc> well, once the SFC deal goes through a big announcement will be in order

<bemasc> erikos: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance/Committees

<walter> I've tried to have a very public discussion about it, so I think we are OK to get started

<marcopg> ok with me

<erikos> bemasc, ok thanks

<walter> Again, my concern is not developers, whom I think are so far pretty well represented

<walter> But there are few educators... this is how we differ from other projects

<marcopg> sure that's great...

<marcopg> my concern was mostly political

<marcopg> i.e. people might not see the election as completely impartial

<bemasc> it seems to me that it would be nice to have an elections committee prior to the elections. Anyone want to be on the membership+elections committee?

<walter> I think we should be OK... people have had lots of opportunity to speak up...

<marcopg> because someone designated the electors

<erikos> and there is no real exchange between educators and devs i think

<dfarning> I am working on locating a few people to bridge the developer/educator gap

<walter> Yes. and a few others are as well.

<walter> Reaching out particularly to teachers in the large deployments

<bemasc> One thing we can do, and that I have started doing, is saying to educators "If you have an idea, we can build it", a little like the Linux Drivers Project. Perhaps we can make that more official.

<walter> I don't know how closely you follow the olpc-sur discussion, but it is pretty good

<bemasc> not official; public

<marcopg> should we finish up on the committees?

<marcopg> do we have a list of those? I thought we had

<bemasc> marcopg: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance/Committees

<marcopg> ok membership is clearly needed

<marcopg> finance seems also clear

<marcopg> community seem important to me

<bemasc> infrastructure seems necessary

<marcopg> someone to organize the events etc

<marcopg> bemasc: what's the role of the infra one?

<marcopg> I mean

<bemasc> marcopg: to manage sugarlabs.org

<marcopg> how is it different from sysadmin

<bemasc> marcopg: it's not

<marcopg> committees are elected? I forgot

<bemasc> I actually argued at one point for a Treasurer to head the finance committee and a Sysadmin to head the infrastructure committee

<walter> I have those roles, but not in the committee list

<bemasc> marcopg: currently, they are. I'm not sure that elections are the best way for committees, but I don't know what the best way is.

<marcopg> it's a little weird to have an elected or even designated sysadmin team

<marcopg> shouldn't that work like the developers team?

<walter> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance/Oversight_Board

<marcopg> or is the committee to decide which servers to buy for example?

<walter> I am not sure every committee member has to be elected

<walter> but the heads of the committees should be elected

<walter> they set policy as much as implement

<marcopg> walter: yeah I'm just not sure if the sysadmin team should be related to the board at all

<bemasc> marcopg: to decide what servers to buy, to decide to switch from mediawiki to texwiki, to decide that we will run our own Jabber server, etc.

<marcopg> it seem like a technical thing

<marcopg> but yeah since we are going to spend the foundation money on it, it might make sense

<walter> I think sysadmin and treasurer are working on behalf of the committees

<marcopg> not sure if it's large enough to require a committee though

<marcopg> or if the board could handle directly

<cjl> What about setting policy at bcrat level on wiki, etc. stuff that needs an arbitration mechanism, it if comes to it.

<walter> the treasurer I think we get from the SF Conservancy, so it is really just sysadmin

<marcopg> many people told us we have too many committees there

<erikos> marcopg, the committee should probably get technical opinions from the devs and admins and then decide

<marcopg> erikos: yeah but the same can do the board directly

<marcopg> just trying to see if we can reduce the number of committees a bit I guess

<bemasc> marcopg: we used to have too many committees. Also, I see the education committee as a trick to lure in more educators.

<marcopg> and create them on demand

<erikos> marcopg, committee in general sounds scary to me :)

<marcopg> oh we already reduced them

<walter> I don't know which committees to eliminate, but we need not launch them all at once

<bemasc> marcopg: that page is called "bootstrapping", with the idea that once things are running, we can change committees as needed

<walter> But we should take care, because disbanding a committee is probably difficult

<marcopg> walter: ok, so which ones we need right away?

<cjl> Infrastructure not needed day one oversight will handle it.

<bemasc> oversight will handle any details that nobody else is handling

<walter> also maybe finance can lean on the SFC in the beginning

<cjl> Membership, finance needed day one, community on day two.

<marcopg> membership is the obvious one

<walter> maybe that is all we elect at the start

<bemasc> walter: I like that.

<cjl> finance somewhat optional, nice to have out of hands of oversight for trust reasons.

<marcopg> walter: make sense

<tomeu> committees may help with people feeling more responsible of their areas of contribution?

<cjb> cjl: that sounds backwards :)

<bemasc> we can elect the membership and elections committee, who then get to figure out how to proceed.

<walter> We have the SFC to handle the money (of which we have none) to start

<tomeu> (what greg dek said about having tons of VPs)

<walter> I don't recall... sounds like a Dilbert

<marcopg> tomeu: I think that's on the technical side mostly

<marcopg> like the bug triage team lead

<tomeu> hmm, sure?

<cjl> cjb it is a two-man segregation of duties thing. I deal with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance at a public company :-(

<marcopg> or the documentation team lead

<marcopg> I think what dfarning set up goes very much in that direction

<marcopg> we have these teams people can feel part of

<marcopg> or even lead

<tomeu> walter: when edward cherlin became our VP of localization

<walter> I'm not sure exactly what the VP thing is all about... heads of our working groups/task forces??

<marcopg> walter: of our teams I think, yeah

<walter> One question is who gets a beautiful Sugar Labs business card?

<walter> Any member?

<bemasc> anyone?

<bemasc> creative commons!

<walter> And then we can have some means of assigning titles?

<tomeu> sounds good

<marcopg> any member I'd say

<marcopg> anyway

<walter> Then many the head of each task force (as designated by the taxonomy that Dave set up) becomes a VP?

<cjb> People tend to be encouraged towards volunteerism by having their role made public and obvious, so all sounds good.

<marcopg> do we agree about setting up membership and do the others on demand?

<bemasc> are you suggesting that Sugar Labs will have VP posts?

<cjb> I'm still pretty confused about why non-educators volunteer for Sugar. It's not scratching an itch. :)

<bemasc> I don't see that anywhere in the governance document...

<walter> Probably a detail we need not sort out now, but anything that encourages participation is goodness.

<cjb> bemasc: I didn't mean to suggest that, just that business cards and titles may help volunteerism.

<tomeu> cjb: some people have itches in strange places ;)

<cjb> :)

<walter> It has been a mystery from the very beginning... not the norm for a FOSS project

<walter> I'm not wild about VP this and that as a title... seems too corporate...

<tomeu> hmm, every project can be very different in that regard

<dfarning> And, the best people just like solving interesting and challenging problems:)

<cjb> So, anything we can do to provide extra motivation given that the itch won't be there sounds good. Webspace, mail address, so on?

<bemasc> Proposal: once the SFC deal is complete, we send out an e-mail to all member asking them to nominate themselves for the Membership and Elections committee, with instructions on how to add their name to the list on selectricity. We announce an election date (perhaps a week hence), and then elect that committee.

<cjb> yes, VP is an odd title for us. There may be better titles.

<tomeu> cjb++

<bemasc> cjb++

<walter> +1; Well, shall we move on?

<tomeu> yeah, I thought it would be more normal for people from the US ;)

<cjb> I like "Activist", but that's just me ;-)

<tomeu> don't know who like it, then

<bemasc> this raises a question: how do we e-mail all members?

<walter> I have an email list I compiled for all the members

<marcopg> oh damn

<marcopg> yueah

<marcopg> ah nice!

<cjb> great.

<cjl> mass wiki-mail? IAEP

<walter> I haven't put it anywhere yet---I'll make a list on the mailman server...

<tomeu> hmm, shouldn't we communicate with the members through the main mailing list?

<walter> Is it mailman or the host you don't like? or email in general?

<bemasc> I don't see a need for a members-only list

<marcopg> tomeu: we can't assume they are subscribed I think

<tomeu> at least during the bootstrapping process, so we are more open

<tomeu> that's an issue, yeah

<walter> I need to send ballots out somehow

<bemasc> walter: just the host having no obvious connection to sugarlabs

<marcopg> bemasc: we are fixing

<bemasc> marcopg: great

<cjb> walter: maybe mako would be willing to run the electionN?

<marcopg> infra is on the agenda

<marcopg> (not so great, it's being painful!)

<walter> It'll get better

<unmadindu> walter: maybe it might be a good idea to reuse the gnome foundation election infrastructure ?

<bemasc> walter: I don't know quite what you mean by ballots

<bemasc> walter: ok, I see

<bemasc> selectricity requires that each user be provided with a distinct secret string that enables them to vote

<bemasc> so what we are describing is a list of e-mails, but not a "mailing list". Each user receives a different e-mail.

<cjl> bemasc: yes

<walter> I have the list of emails.... most, but not all are either on sugar or education

<bemasc> also "its.an.education.project" is beginning to seem a bit petulant to me

<cjb> well, more outdated, since we're no longer about compelling OLPC to do things.

<bemasc> the name was chosen to emphasize that we are the bearers of the true and great Sugar tradition, not the new false religion, or something.

<walter> Really? I think the education debate has been getting more substance (and Albert is being reasonable in his language)

<cjb> walter: oh, I think he just means the name

<cjb> The posts themselves are fine with me.

<bemasc> yeah, just the name

<marcopg> should be just Education maybe

<bemasc> I don't know, it's not terrible

<tomeu> yeah, albert looks to be making a big effort

<marcopg> we already changed the title

<cjb> gmane has it as "sugar-discuss"

<cjb> marcopg: oh, what to?

<bemasc> cjb: interesting

<walter> Oh. Well, I like the idea of a list for technical details and a list for education discussions,

<tomeu> heh

<walter> As has been pointed out on the OLPC-sur list, combining the two is off-putting to non-geeks

<marcopg> cjb: Education

<bemasc> it's a tricky political issue though. Presently, we have IAEP and sugar@lists.laptop.org

<marcopg> "Education" :<its.an.education.project@tema.lo-res.org>,

<bemasc> neither are hosted at a sugarlabs domain, and both have lots of subscribers

<marcopg> not sure if it has always been like that actually :)

<tomeu> let's move on with the organization, we'll be able to tackle this issues better later

<walter> +1

<walter> Just quickly: Luca is working up some new sketches for us for a "corporate identity"

<walter> I think the basic graphic is very appealing

<marcopg> walter: we need to get him more feedback about the logo I think

<marcopg> walter: he has been asking me about it

<bemasc> I'm not sure what to make of it. It looks like a lower-case o, and some pretty deformed hooklike hands

<marcopg> bemasc: did you see all of them?

<walter> Maybe the "hands" are too hook-like...

<bemasc> marcopg: no

<marcopg> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DesignTeam/Logo-ideas#Designs_by_Luca_Ferrari_and_Franco_Lodato

<walter> I think they look better in 2D.

<marcopg> anyway I guess my question is how do we go about choosing one

<marcopg> art is subjective :P

<walter> Luca is working on better typography

<marcopg> Bernie seem to dislike all of them for example

<cjb> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:Sugarlabs2.png :)

<cjb> I like lots of these!

<marcopg> (all of those designed by Luca, that is)

<bemasc> I like a bunch of them

<bemasc> I'm sure we can find something

<walter> I think they look very amateurish (the sugar bowls)

<bemasc> this seems like exactly the sort of thing that we don't have to decide here

<bemasc> thankfully

<walter> +1

<tomeu> heh

<marcopg> yeah though we need to move forward on it in some way :)

<erikos> we can do a voting :)

<marcopg> guess we can discuss later on iaep

<cjb> yeah :) I don't think we need to vote or anything; a simple show of hands on the mailing list once we think we have everything up there would be fine.

<marcopg> erikos: yeah but using Luca ones means we also get a website :)

<erikos> marcopg, aha i see :p

<marcopg> anyway

<marcopg> let's use the education list for this

<walter> I agree that handing this off to some willing pros is not a bad strategy

<walter> but we can get a show of hands on the list

<tomeu> if I had energy to discuss about the logos, we'd have composition in 8.2.0

<marcopg> hehe

<tomeu> but this is something that can be left entirely to the rest of the community

<cjl> I someaht disagree about doing this by e-mail list, I think you use the list to move the discussion to the wiki. Just my thoughts.

<walter> I'll ask people to make comments in the wiki... we have some, but not many to date.

<walter> anyway, next topic?

<marcopg> yeah

<walter> Budget

<walter> We have a few expenses that are going to come up.

<walter> One is getting international trademarks (for Sugar Labs and our beautiful logo to be)

<walter> the SFLA will handle the legal aspects for us pro bono, but not the filing fees.

<erikos> oh in which category we are for fees?

<walter> Apparently this will cost real money--several tens of thousands of dollars

<marcopg> huh

<erikos> eeh for once?

<walter> the problem is we are a global project

<tomeu> hmm

<walter> we need to file in lots of different places

<tomeu> who could sponsor that?

<cjl> Is there a mechanism to accept funds (before SFC)?

<marcopg> cjl: nope

<marcopg> walter: it seems hard to find someone to sponsor this

<walter> I think that once we have Sugar Labs up and running, I need to switch mostly into fundraising mode.

<bemasc> is this trademark thing really necessary?

<cjb> walter: what's the motivation for getting the trademarks?

<tomeu> sorry, need to leave for 5 minutes

<walter> I was told by Eben Moglen that we really should trademark...

<bemasc> it might be easier to change name every year and spend the several tens of thousands of dollars paying developer and educators, sponsoring conferences, etc.

<walter> It is standard for FOSS projects and it is a potential point of leverage.

<erikos> what could possibly happen if we don't trademark?

<marcopg> I wonder how GNOME did it

<walter> Something to discuss. But we need to establish a strong identity.

<bemasc> walter: this is certainly surprising. There are a lot of famous FOSS projects out there with budgets that don't even remotely compare

<cjb> I guess Firefox and Openoffice are trademarked. Can't think of any others off-hand.

<marcopg> cjb: GNOME is apparently

<walter> I think most of them are... but not necessarily everywhere.

<cjb> marcopg: GNOME has an awful lot of money, I've never worked out why :)

<marcopg> KDE too

<cjb> ie. >$100k.

<walter> Maybe that is the piece we can debate.

<marcopg> cjb: they have very low membership, don't get where they get those from

<walter> Most of the GNOME budget goes to organizing meetings.

<cjb> marcopg: I think their corporate sponsors give a lot. They just hired an Executive Director full-time, even.

<walter> the money comes from corporate memberships

<marcopg> yeah

<unmadindu> cjb: I guess the advisory board pays significatly

<walter> yeah. we may have to do the same thing

<erikos> walter, the trademark is a thing per country http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm or can you get a global one ?

<walter> (Trademarks are generally country by country)

<unmadindu> cjb: * Small company: 1-49 employees. $5,000 / year

<unmadindu> * Medium and large company: 50 or more employees. $10,000 / year

<marcopg> I guess it all depends on much we can raise anyway :)

<unmadindu> http://foundation.gnome.org/about/

<cjb> So, a better question: firefox, openoffice, gnome and kde represent software projects whose codebases have existed for over ten years each. Why are we like them with regard to trademarks?

<bemasc> walter: what the trademark status of "Sugar"?

<walter> The other way to do things is get attached to venues like linuxfoundation

<walter> (Sugar is not trademarked--I checked several months ago with Robert Fadel at OLPC)

<walter> they have offered to help us participate in their spring conference in SF

<unmadindu> cjb: some troll might decide to trademark sugar instead and then sue us.. it happened in the case of "Linux"

<bemasc> unmadindu: and Linus won.

<walter> As some of us have discussed in the past, I'd like a Sugar Labs presence at a section of Linux and Learning conferences around the world

<unmadindu> yeah - but that was additional headache to handle ;)

<erikos> bemasc, he had probably the money to defend himself :/

<bemasc> it's certainly a fight we'd like to avoid

<walter> that'll take some money... not just once as in the trademark, but every year

<walter> (Let's agree to get advice from the SFLA re the trademark issue)

<erikos> unmadindu, your numbers were per year no?

<marcopg> walter: +1

<erikos> walter, sure - i know nothing in that area

<unmadindu> erikos: yep

<walter> I don't think we need to decide now, but making some decisions soon on what conferences are important to the Sugar community is important

<marcopg> walter: would you like to have someone from SugarLabs in all the important confs?

<walter> so we can plan resources and calendars

<marcopg> that could cost quite a bit of moneys, I guess

<walter> It'd be great if there was some representation in each continent at least once per year...

<walter> but we can leverage the local Sugar teams too

<walter> we don't all have to travel all the time

<marcopg> yeah leveraging local make sense...

<marcopg> we won't be able to make all that travelling :)

<walter> makes sense in terms of time, money and the environment

<bemasc> Sugar Labs has a certain egalitarian philosophy, so asking any local members to represent us seems in the spirit of the thing.

<cjb> I'd rather have all the Sugar developers at one conference than a Sugar developer at each, I think.

<walter> cjb++, but we need to do both

<marcopg> yeah having all Sugar devs at a conf a couple of times per year would be great

<walter> but not both at every conference

<cjb> :)

<bemasc> marcopg: does it need to be a conference?

<marcopg> bemasc: no, not necessarily

<walter> maybe a rich online forum.

<bemasc> (it's cheaper if you don't have to pay conference fees for everyone)

<walter> I could ask CISCO to help

<walter> yeah, conference fees suck

<cjb> Ubuntu seems to be pretty heavily into online meetings (IRC, gobby, voip). Dunno how successful they are, though.

<marcopg> mako might know?

<walter> I've had some good discussions with CISCO re Sugar Labs

<walter> Sugar devel does a good job already with online tools

<walter> But the learning community is way behind on this

<walter> that is the bigger challenge

<walter> I put a link to education meetings too

<bemasc> well, we're talking about how to spend money we don't have

<marcopg> yeah, that one sounds tricky

<walter> I need to get a feel for how much money I need to try to raise...

<walter> and for what purposes

<walter> Then it will be easier for me to make a plan

<bemasc> it depends what Sugar Labs is... but what Sugar Labs is depends on how much money we have

<erikos> chicken - egg

<walter> I had an interesting conversation with Chuck about this yesterday

<bemasc> if it's a few thousand dollars a year, then it goes toward conference fees

<bemasc> if it's 50,000 a year then maybe it can go towards airfare too

<walter> I think we will need to raise a lot more than a few thousand, but not the tens of millions that OLPC raises

<bemasc> if it's $100,000 a year then maybe Sugar Labs can start contracting people to do more software work, or curriculum material writing

<walter> I'd like to help people raise money for such efforts, but not raise it for them

<bemasc> (subject to Mako's warning about paying people when others are volunteer)

<walter> I'm trying to get a universtiy network going

<bemasc> I like that idea

<marcopg> yeah

<marcopg> walter: what Chuck thinking about this?

<bemasc> I think a lot of Sugar Labs stuff would be great undergrad projects and even postdoc projects

<walter> I spoke, for example, with the University of Tampere (where I have a visiting appointment), about raising money from TEKES, the Finnish science foundation to support their Suagr-related efforts

<walter> that is easier than getting TEKES money to Sugar Labs itself.

<walter> Chuck and I talked about corporate money

<walter> He thinks I am not being aggressive enough

<bemasc> I'm perfectly happy with the idea that all the sugar developers would work for interested universities and corporations

<walter> We plan to revisit the topic in the coming weeks

<marcopg> ok, anything else we need to cover about funding?

<walter> who to talk to and what types of relationships to establish

<cjb> walter: perhaps we could ask everyone with a stake in Sugar to contribute a person/funding for a "Sugar Labs developer"?

<bemasc> Gnome, somewhat unexpectedly, has found themselves with a lot of money, and decided to hire a full time project manager

<cjb> I'm not good with this sort of strategy, happy to leave it to Walter :)

<walter> The model I proposed to Chuck was that industry give engineers, not money

<bemasc> cjb: I think companies will be much more willing to donate $10,000 a year as writeoff than to designate an engineer as working on Sugar

<bemasc> engineers, remember, cost $200,000 a year, even though they're paid much less

<walter> Hopefully we'll start to get both

<unmadindu> bemasc: there was someone earlier as well - Tim Ney

<cjb> walter: That would work. I was just imagining the edge case of an organization that doesn't employ Python programmers.

<cjb> bemasc: I had the opposite intuition, actually.

<cjb> bemasc: Companies aren't rational; they might prefer to reassign someone to a task than to "spend money".

<bemasc> I think any company that is interested in Sugar enough to contribute to Sugar Labs is already going to have lots of people working on Sugar-related stuff

<bemasc> cjb: charitable donations are unusually cheap for corporations due to tax law

<cjb> That's true.

<cjl> Why are corporations going to be interested in Sugar, I get it for the distros, but Sugar?

<bemasc> cjl: there's a company right now working on deploying an XO-based online tutoring system (something about No Child Left Behind...)

<bemasc> their current plan is to deploy a dedicated tutoring system OS that, at the end of the self-guided course, unlocks and reveals Sugar underneath

<bemasc> that's just a specific example I am aware of

<cjb> bemasc: huh. who's that?

<walter> there is lots of non-education interest in Sugar too

<cjb> hm, point of order: coming up on 3pm here. Anything else on the agenda?

<bemasc> cjb: I don't know... the developer shows up in #olpc-devel occasionally

<cjb> (If the answeris "nothing else on the agenda, but let's keep chatting for a while", that's fine too.)

<marcopg> the agenda is very long still

<cjb> walter: Waht to talk a little about the non-education interest?

<marcopg> but I'm not sure we will have energy to cover all

<marcopg> cjb: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_July_18_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29

<marcopg> that's the agenda

<walter> We should just talk about infrustructure briefly and then perhaps call the meeting to an end?

<erikos> yeah maybe we can cover some points next week

<e> oh man

<walter> I think we can continue next week...

<cjb> Sounds good. People here are heading off for a football match soon.

<cjb> What's the current situation with infrastructure?

<walter> Just quickly on infrastructure

<bemasc> neuralis offered solarsail?

<walter> and Chuck offered Antenna

<walter> I am still going back and forth with MIT on a server room

<walter> the one they are currently proposing is not ideal

<marcopg> walter: but it's ok as temporary one?

<walter> I hope we can sort this out and get our servers running by the end of next week

<cjb> What's Antenna?

<walter> Antenna is a server that OLPC owns that was never turned on... It was sitting at the Media Lab, waiting for Henry to pick it up

<walter> The server room is OK, but it is messy and lacks decent AC

<cjb> Oh, heh. Okay.

<cjl> No UPS?

<walter> I think UPS, just poorly maintained as a room

<marcopg> we was planning to move services on solarsail this morning

<bemasc> (solarsail is also at MIT)

<marcopg> wiki, mailing list etc

<cjb> I guess solarsail is going to move to this server room too?

<marcopg> cjb: it's there

<marcopg> the main problem we have is how to do backups right now

<walter> I think the real issues are not these...

<walter> it is what services we run as Sugar Labs vs elsewjhere...

<marcopg> yeah those are harder

<marcopg> but having good server in a good location with good backups is also essential :)

<bemasc> until we have the hardware running, we can hardly make that call

<erikos> marcopg, is the backups a space problem or a technical one?

<marcopg> erikos: well, we need a machine to backup on

<walter> Maybe we should see what happens Monday and pick up the thread next week?

<marcopg> with lots of space

<marcopg> to do full backups

<erikos> ok

<marcopg> Bernie argues that we need full backups *now*

<bemasc> sounds like the solution is solarsail _and_ antenna

<erikos> and on the other two machines we already run different services as i understood

<marcopg> bemasc: Ivan and Bernie discusses splitting the services between the two machine

<erikos> so antenna can not be a backup of solarsail

<marcopg> bemasc: for security reasons

<cjb> Well, we can rsync-backup the machines to each other, or use MIT TSM. Seems like this is a sysadmin decision?

<marcopg> yeah technical decision

<cjb> marcopg: well, encrypt the backups, then?

<cjb> I guess I don't really see why sugar labs' server would need to have anything srcure on it. :)

<marcopg> we should probably let Bernie and Ivan sort it out

<cjb> yeah, sure

<marcopg> cjb: I think Ivan would like to put shells on a different machine

<marcopg> cjb: so that it's harder to compromise the services

<walter> Let's call it a day...and pick up here next Friday.

<marcopg> not sure exactly now, /me not a sysadmin type

<erikos> day!

<marcopg> yeah

<walter> We can ask for a report from the ad hoc committee on infra.

<cjb> ok!

<cjb> thanks all!

<walter> thanks to everyone for hanging in there

<bemasc> (meaning bernie and ivan)

<tomeu> ok, nice to talk with you all

<erikos> cjb, thanks for joining in!

<walter> I'll post the log and minutes later today

<marcopg> thanks!

<erikos> thanks to everyone

<walter> ciao