DWC Comments on Minutes
From other non profit board experience, some things seemed a little odd, and while I can't say they are wrong, as a newbie, and very unfamiliar with SugarLab and OLPC organizational structures and history in general, I will point them out for the Board and others to consider:
Reading the log transcript cold (without much other experience):
1) Agendas are usually set ahead of time. Chair of a meeting (usually not the Exec Director, if a paid by the Board position (and I understand all contributors are volunteer), but the board Chair, vice chair, etc and secretary in consultation with the Board and membership itself)
Maybe I missed it.
Several things came up
2) "<walterbender> we are a somewhat Boston-centric group at the moment. "
This may be an issue going forward, IMO. Clearly SugarLabs starts as a spinoff of OLPC, and OLPC is Boston/ Cambridge, Mass, USA centric, but not clear to me which of the principles / governance/ etc of OLPC are inherited into SL, and which are not.
Free and Open Source for example, (and I'm not saying this is something I necessarily want), but if someone wants Sugar on Windows for example, or Sugar on Mac, would the principle from OLPC be inherited in SL? Windows is closed source, Linux is not. Mac / Darwin is somewhere in between as a cousin of Linux in the BSD side of the family tree. Tools and Application layers are more common with GNU toolchain/utils, but diverge in Windowing (Aqua/ Carbon/ etc) vs X Window and substrate GTK, adding Gnome on OLPC XO 1.5, etc.
And that is just some of the technical comparisons, organization structures of paid staff and management in Apple and Microsoft, plus hierarchies vary widely from an open source community based approach.
3) As a corollary to 2 above:
SLOB Liason to Labs, assuming Washington DC is one of the labs, (not sure which others there are)
Who would the representative(s) be? How is that determined? Local votes? or from above, so to speak, SLOBs / Board decides who represents?
4) http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008634.html email thread, which I was very vocal about not being included upon, as a latecomer.
If membership is frozen for the next year, and election terms are 2 years or so (and Christof points out the timeline), then when does the community really get heard?
Several members state "community members" affilation, and OLPC staff is on board, Red Hat is mentioned, but what about people further out? In other countries? With other orientations/ perspectives? Teachers? Students? Grandparents/ PTA, School Administrators, Politicians, Honorary, Etc?
The life cycle of software can be much quicker than hardware, new releases and some new things coming out much quicker than hardware, so most decisions could be made by most of the current board members with little to no direct input from the million or so current OLPC XO 1.0 users if SL development goes towards Sugar On A Stick (tm) or some other development direction.
With OLPC controlling how the hardware is even available, but Sugar running on other more commodity based hardware, I'm wondering if this is a fault line, for lack of a better term, with the continential plates moving different directions..
5) I'd like to reiterate, I like some of what SL is doing,
but have a firm belief, perhaps rooted in more "leaders are
but trusted servants, we do not govern" that it isn't much
behind closed doors (except Executive Session and things like
personnel decisions based on community feedback)
These are comments upon a first reading, and may change over time. Luckily, this is a wiki ;-/
If this is the wrong place to discuss things, please let me know, seems like the discussion page of the main article would be right, but maybe on my personal page? Linked to here or vice versa?
Making governance, policy and procedures easy to understand for people with a little non profit board experience (admittedly while many of these things are being decided for the first time as a 1-2 year old Non Profit) will also make it easier for kids and the users of the software/ Activities to be active participants in the process as well as the code, admittedly democracy biased, but also what I hope open source is all about...
Danceswithcars 16:16, 18 October 2009 (UTC)