[IAEP] OversightBoard/Minutes/Log-2008-08-01-follow up

[David Farning]

WRT--second server--  We have had an offer to host some of our
infrastucture at OSL[1].  Is this something we want to follow up on?

WRT--trade marks--  There appear to be two different reasons for
registering and defending trademarks.  1.  We want to be able to
'project' the Sugar brand by encouraging 'friends' to share and promote
our brand as a measure of quality.  2.  We want to be able to defend our
brand against enemies who would hijack the brand by (a) misusing the
name or (b) holding the name hostage.

At this point, we have no brand to defend;(  99% of the world knows
Sugar as the GUI for OLPC.  The general consensus of Open Source
projects is that registering a trademark is not worth the time or effort
at this point in a projects life cycle.  We should revisit the issue
again in six months.

WRT--Sugar availability-- Getting Sugar into open source advocates hands
is critical.

One of the interesting metrics of projects is the 'Contributor
Engagement Rate'.  I am defining CER as the percent of users who
actively contribute back to a project.  Theses contributions can be in
the form of word-of-mouth support, bug reports, bug fixes, and active
development among other contributions.  End user software such as
Firefox has a low CER, most people just want to use the browser.  As we
shift towards developer software the CER tends to increase.

We are facing a similar situation with the target of OLPC deployments.
It will be several years before the kids start contributing and the
educators have limited experience engaging in the open source process.
In the meantime, we can start priming the pump by engaging existing OSS
developers and users.

WRT--Architect--  Designing the Sugar is not the problem.  The problem
is deciding on the designer.

One approach is the BDFL.  But, I doubt that we could decide on a BD.
Another approach is the Apache consensus model[2].  We need to give the
oversight board the final authority and responsibility to plan Sugar's
future.

The catch here will be selecting the initial oversight board to insure
everyone's interest is represented.  A possibility is 2 OLPC
representatives, 2 RedHat representatives, 2 Sugar Labs representatives,
and 1 neutral third party.  Please note this is just a brainstorm.

WRT--LiveCD--  SkoleLinux has a live cd.  I believe there was an attempt
to put Sugar on a live ubuntu variant.  I think the developer chose
Xubuntu, for space reasons, and then hacked the installer to load Sugar
as the default.

The various derivative teams are getting _very_good_ at creating custom
spins and liveCDs.  If we can help get stable .deb and .rpm packages the
spins will follow shortly.     
  
Just some thoughs
dfarning

1. http://osuosl.org/hosting
2. http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html