I've looked at some initial discussion on the "decision panel" (I don't even have time to read all of it) and I think it's time to go back to the start.
For each question: who's asking? is it a reasonable question? have we definitely failed to reach community consensus? what effects will the answer have? Sebastian asked the original question: "Is the current SoaS going to be the primary way Sugar Labs distributes a Sugar-centric GNU/Linux distribution?" After communicating with Sebastian by IRC and email (me being skeptical and curious why this question was even being asked), I learned that Sebastian is not trying to make his SoaS project be the king-of-all-distributions (he encourages competition) but simply wants to know if it is safe to call his project "Sugar on a stick." The original question doesn't matter to him, or perhaps we can say that the original question was developed to becoming a simple question of project naming. So that leads to what I believe is the only question with any importance: "Should 'Sugar on a Stick' be a phrase that SL asks its community to avoid using unless they refer to the SoaS-Fedora distribution?" Who's asking? Sebastian Is it a reasonable question? Yes. There has been some confusion about use of the name: - Sugar on a stick has been a concept within the community for a long time, only recently has it become a solid, mainstream implementation (and even then, there was still a strong element of concept in the marketing) - Non-Fedora distros have also started making sugar distros that run from live USB, and although they haven't been named "Sugar on a stick," I recall at least a few mentions from people in the community referring to them that way - Another party registered the domain name sugaronastick.com Have we definitely failed to reach community consensus? Yes, there seem to be 2 common conflicting viewpoints: - Sebastian has done great work, let's give him the name and get any other projects to use new names - No, lets reserve the name as a marketing term, for clarity of message. (even though Sebastian can use it for now) It's trivial to find examples of these conflicting viewpoints in the threads that have emerged so far What effects will the answer have? Sebastian has indicated that it's important to him, and a decision here would affect how he names his work and possibly where he hosts it, and which umbrella organisation he sees his work underneath. The other questions all fail the tests in my opinion - nobody is asking them for any practical purpose, and the results from a decision panel will not have any effect. For example, the decision panel could say that SL should focus on being a distro builder, but what does that even mean? All SL work is volunteer based, that answer isn't going to magically make people start doing that work where they weren't before. I also think that any kind of decision delegation should be done by a small group, in a short time, and with only a small amount of extra community input (the decision was handed off to a panel precisely because the community could not reach consensus). Let's finish the politics quickly and move back to real work... remember our goal: education? Daniel p.s. I'm still not clear if this decision panel has been formed for every undecided question that might possibly form in the future, or if it will be torn down after this particular session? _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
