Oversight Board/2018-2020-candidates/Amaan Iqbal

Hi Everyone! I am Amaan Iqbal. I am a full stack web developer and collaborator on SugarLabs www-sugarlabs repository.

I am one of the active mentors for SugarLabs at GCI 2018 and had meaningful on time interaction with 119/559 tasks. Some of the major tasks which I authored apart from bug fixes were :

• Finding redundancy in website code. A Pull Request with significant change was this
• Plan for updating the website to Bootstrap 4.1 with the removal of several components that would be redundant including owl-carousel
• Plan for Chatbot functionality in place of IRC which was currently removed

I am excited towards the mission of SugarLabs of providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Being one of the major Open Source Organization, underutilization of the strengths of the contributors willing to help is also one of the biggest problems which are preventing us from significant improvements. We have failed significantly to communicate effectively with them and understanding their mindset behind their way and type of contribution. And as a result, the contributors lacked proper guidance towards their area of interest i.e., towards those repositories/components in which they can help a lot with their skillset.

One of the major problem for lack of participation in the development team meeting and the SLOBs meeting is due to the timings of the meeting. Its 22:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC i.e., 3:30 A.M. IST and 1:30 A.M. IST respectively. It's too much for any South Asian contributor to join at that time regularly. We must find a proper matching timing for SLOBs meeting so that SLOBs member and regular contributors would not face much difficulties.

I strongly believe for the proper maintenance of Sugar and related repositories, it's better to divide the tasks/components on some basis among different Oversight Board members and their maintenance should be done separately. In this way, we can clearly see the progress on any particular domain starting from design to maintenance of activities and there would not be any unnecessary dependency or expectation from other members which I have seen to happen quite frequently so far with us. This will also help in identifying how we are going on a predefined roadmap. Though there must be some consensus before taking some important decision.

If elected :

• I agree to handle slight email load throughout the year and major load during GSoC, GCI, and other open source programs
• I agree to attend all meetings provided we try to match the timings accordingly among SLOB members and regular contributors
• I agree to create a proper road map of how SugarLabs will function especially how SugarLabs website will look content and design wise depending upon consensus between the board members and will communicate effectively in coming out with improvised designs of Sugar Activities.
• I agree to break down design tasks in proper chunks such that any basic designer can contribute effectively, resulting in maximized contributions