Oversight Board/2018-2020-candidates/Alex Perez

2018-2020 Candidacy page for Alex Perez (MrBIOS)

Hi folks, my name is Alex Perez, and I am a systems administration volunteer for Sugar Labs. I was an original Give-One-Get-One XO-1 laptop donor/recipient, and am a strong believer in the mission of Sugar Labs.

As a volunteer member, I help maintain the Sugar Labs servers and service infrastructure, and I strongly believe the state of the Sugar Labs Oversight Board is very unhealthy.

In mid-2018, I spent a not-insignificant amount of time triaging the unstructured list of proposed goals for 2018, at https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Goals/2018_Submissions, only to have literally ZERO responses once I sent this e-mail[1], back in July. Not one member of the Oversight Board responded, positively or negatively. Needless to say, I found this very disappointing and disheartening, and I have come to believe that the stagnation of the Oversight Board is dangerous to the future of Sugar Labs.

I vow to attend every monthly meeting I am able to, as well as continue to contribute to the Sugar Labs community in other ways, including but not limited to advocacy, outreach at maker events, and recruitment of experienced Python developers to contribute to the Sugar codebase. All of these things are required for the health of Sugar Labs to improve through 2019-2020.

I hope to have a positive impact on the future of Sugar Labs, as well as help to significantly improve and re-invigorate the activeness of the Oversight Board in actually setting and achieving goals.

Much of the work of porting Sugar to Python 3 was done this summer, however it is critical that this work continue so we can be ready for 2020, when Python 2.x is finally officially end-of-lifed. 100% Python 3 compatibility is an important goal which must be achieved.