Well, Andre, not having a divisive issue like Mer under your name makes for less interesting feedback, I suppose. As I doubted whether you'd really appreciate "You've been doing a kickass job, dude!" as feedback, I've been thinking about this one for the past few days.

Let me start out by saying, "You've been doing a kickass job, dude!" You're in a hard position, one that, I believe, is likely more difficult than any Nokia employee or other Maemo Community member occupies. You're stuck between a rock (Nokia) and a hard place (the community), with both parties using you to do their dirty work and shovel their **** around. Nokia uses you communicate all of their terrible decisions to the masses, the community makes you advocate for all of their unpopular positions to Nokia, and you end up dealing with a lot of unpleasantness on both sides for things you're not responsible for.

As bad as that all is, it doesn't include the hours a day toiling through boring-as-all-get-out, and often useless, bug reports from reporters who are frequently just looking for a support channel or a place to vent their overactive spleens; nor playing the only communication link between the internal and external Bugzillas, copying information both ways—by hand—to make sure the duplicated trackers are in sync to support Nokia's outdated and inefficient tracking policies.

Now this is a bleak picture I've painted and I know you don't see it that way, and I know it has its fair share of position and gratifying work too—you're making people feel like somebody cares about their software issues, you're helping them learn valuable new skills, and you're helping to make Maemo and maemo.org an awesome software platform and an awesome place to be, but I've had glimpses into your world, and I don't think I could ever handle it with as much calm and thoroughness as you do.

Enough smoke blowing, on to the productive:

There are a few areas where I'd like to see improvements (though most aren't your fault).

First, 3.4 is taking forever. Somebody needs to get Tero to give Karsten more hours if that needs to happen, and somebody needs to kick Karsten's *** into getting this work onto a public CVS and being open about what's happening.

Second, I'm worried that you're ending up an enabler for Nokia's closed practices. You're making it too easy for them to keep operating as they are. Notice that Nokia has improved very little in their processes over the past couple years, yet the quality and quantity of incoming reports is higher than ever and they're actually getting a lot of useful information out of them (whether they actually look externally or not, thanks to your efforts ). With recent MeeGo-related developments, though, it's also likely entirely pointless to worry about this, as so much will be changing in the next 6 months—both for the better and the ill (will Harmattan even have an external bug tracker? ). But it's, perhaps, something to ponder on as we move forward.

Third, engagement with the Bugsquad is unfortunately still low. You're still doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting (which stands to reason, as you're the only one getting paid for it—but still). Looking at ways we could help improve this for MeeGo in the future is something to think about.

Well, that was a long time simmering, hopefully it's somewhat useful. In summary: Thanks, Andre.