Thank you for starting the thread Anthonie. As a current council member and one of the candidates, I will tell you what I see as the important issues for the future and my basic opinion on them.

First and foremost in my mind is community governance and purpose. This is why I have consistently pushed for a broader based self-governing community including users and have proposed a mission statement to be adopted. The most important step to achieving a successful community is to set goals, and determine and define what we will regard as our success. I think the role of Council should be to guide the community to achieving such goals and mission and should not be limited to facilitating communications between Nokia and the community.

Secondly, I propose the use of organization, management and planning for community projects and activities to achieve our mission. Others have long advocated that maemo.org should be an ad hoc "sandbox" environment for maemo development where the infrastructure and development help is provided. I would reject that limitation as the circumstances have changed from what they were three years ago and we need to think about how we have some form of maemo survive. This is not to say that Council would get deeply involved in projects, but that we will work with those that are relevant to moving some form of maemo forward so that it can be used in the future. As example, I point to the CSSU (both Diablo and Fremantle) that I have supported over the last year.

Finally, while it is important to scratch the itches we have now, I think we have to keep open all available options so that an open source maemo like experience remains available to users in the future. We will work with Nokia to the extent that is possible and fits our mission, but if need be, with other projects as well so that we have appropriate devices and software in the future. This notion of breaking with the past is unpleasant to some people, but we should move past the nostalgia.

If you have any questions, I will answer them to the extent my schedule permits over the next few days.