Sugar Labs

Oversight Board/Meeting Minutes-2019-04-05

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Present

Board members
Walter Bender, James Cameron (chair), Samson Goddy, Lionel Laské, Alex Perez, and Devin Ulibarri. (Claudia Urrea was in flight at the time.)

Visitors

Community members
Jaskirat Singh and Peace Ojemeh.

Agenda

  • Appoint new Project Representative,
  • Receive report from Google Summer of Code Sugar Labs organisation administrator,
  • Consider Google Season of Docs involvement,
  • Sugar workshop, Nigeria, Kano,
  • Fedora 30 release,
  • Appoint new GNOME Representative,
  • Sugarizer missing from sugar-devel@,
  • Complaints,

Appoint new Project Representative

James Cameron resigned as project representative. Devin Ulibarri was appointed.

We discussed;

  • reasons for resignation,
  • possibility of ending our relationship with the Conservancy,
AGREED MOTION 2019-13
appoint Devin Ulibarri as Project Representative to the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Receive Report from Google Summer of Code Sugar Labs organisation administrator

Walter Bender made a report;

  • proposals are landing, they need to be in by next week,
  • we will submit mentors to Google to demonstrate that we have mentors available,
  • once we have slots assigned and agree on which proposals to accept, we can cull the mentor list,

We discussed;

  • quality of proposals; students unwilling to research, or who have familiar technologies they wish to use,
  • adding Tarun, as mentor for Sugarizer Dashboard,
  • limits on number of mentors,
  • how more than one mentor per project creates doubt as to who is responsible to answer,
  • we will have mentors submitted to Google who participate in pedagogy, music, or other facets of development,
  • risks of secret conversations between mentors and students,
  • our traditions are not codified,

We did not make a decision.

Google Season of Docs

Google Open Source Program Office is offering Technical writers working on projects and sponsored by Google.

We discussed;

  • our user and teacher documentation is in need of work, particularly for Sugar and Sugarizer,
  • we can't easily do it at the same time as Google Summer of Code,
  • an education team are interested that we should apply, but the team hasn't demonstrated their participation with us,
  • we would expect both developers and an education team to be interacting with the technical writers,
  • we don't need any API documentation, it is in good order,
AGREED MOTION 2019-14
apply to the Google Season of Docs 2019 program.

Sugar workshop, Nigeria, Kano

A Sugar workshop will be held end of April in Kano, Nigeria;

  • city center,
  • kids and parents from the area,
  • public event,
  • Ahmed Idris is the lead, with some teachers,
  • Sugar workstations (Fedora SoaS) with different activities,

We discussed,

  • Sugar activity collaboration feature won't be used,
  • possibility of creating a mailing list if needed, or use iaep@ and sugar-devel@,

We did not make a decision.

Fedora 30 release

One of our target distributions is all set to release with Sugar 0.112 and broken collaboration on the 16th April, yet 0.113 contains some fixes for collaboration.

We discussed;

  • Simon Schampijer (AKA erikos) is listed as the current Fedora Sugar package maintainer,

We did not make a decision.

GNOME Representative

Our previous GNOME project representative went missing. We appoint a new one.

We discussed;

  • the representative will be required to attend weekly board meetings, as well as to "Attend the two days of in-person meetings prior to GUADEC", as laid out at https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard
  • GUADEC 2019 is being held in Thessaloniki, Greece August 23rd — 28th,
AGREED MOTION 2019-15
appoint Alex Perez as one of our GNOME project representatives.

Sugarizer missing from sugar-devel@

Discussions about Sugarizer are not only not happening on sugar-devel@, but questions about Sugarizer are not being answered, and students could not find Lionel's mail address.

Lionel agreed to add his mail address to his GitHub profile.

We did not make a decision.

Complaints

Samson has received confidential complaints about Sugar Labs;

  • we are unsafe, rude, and don't want to listen,
  • we don't take our vision seriously,

We discussed;

  • who we are,
  • this is an important issue,
  • why people would tell Samson,
  • newcomers can think their ideas are wonderful,
  • hasty replies are seen as rude and brief, yet careful replies are seen as rude and condescending,
  • the complaint can be a criticism of the power we have in the meritocracy, (or a failure to engage in the meritocracy),
  • possibility of anonymous suggestion box, or survey, but this risks further trolling, and how asking questions about a problem makes a problem larger,
  • need to accommodate new and veteran contributors, ... let them make mistakes and learn,
  • we are all very pressured time-wise, it is so boring to repeat the same advice over and over,
  • we might ask our Ombudsman to investigate,
  • we have a welcome to Sugar Labs checklist, (lists the skills and achievements to attain),
  • private complaints should be public so the community can react,
  • use more empathy,
  • the assisting mentor issue; a perception of non-inclusiveness, caused by using wrong forum, a code of conduct issue.

We did not make a decision.

Meeting closed at around 21:12.

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