Thread: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
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qgil is offline qgil
2009-05-09 , 10:41
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#8
I think penguinbait has a point here:
Communication

Open communication is one of the core values of the Community Council, both to serve as an example to Nokia and because it's the right thing to do. All communication is open by default.

* All Community Council oriented conversation will happen either on the maemo-community mailing list, or over IRC in #maemo.
* Community and Council issues will be distilled and summarized in the Council blog (which is also syndicated to Planet).
* If you use Twitter, Community Council tweets can be followed using the hashtag #m.occ.
* Council members' tasks will be allocated the same as maemo.org staff, Nokia community liaisons and community members' committments through the sprint process.
Proposing some changes:

Open communication is one of the core values of the Community Council, both to serve as an example to Nokia and because it's the right thing to do. All communication is open by default.
  • News and calls for participation are summarized in the Council blog (RSS).
  • Council micro-updates can be followed at [new thread to be created in this forum] (watch)
  • Council oriented conversation happens in the maemo.org Talk forum (archive) and the maemo-community mailing list (archive), in threads identified with the [Council] tag.
  • Also, Council members are usually present over IRC in #maemo, happy to chat with you.
Comments:

- Why Twitter when we have Talk.

- I don't think the sprint tasks are actually Council related. Or better said, I don't think that council members taking tasks there take them because they are council members. All those tasks can be pushed by someone with the will, the time and the skills. Being elected changes nothing. It's actually the other way around: skilled people investing a lot of time in community tasks might end up easily being elected in the Council.

The latter is an important detail. The role of the council is more of facilitation than actual work. Of course council members take a lot of work, but they would take it anyway without being elected, am I wrong?

This goes for

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
A lot of work. It's not an easy position. Expect to invest a lot of time and effort, and expect to deal with unpleasantness on a pretty regular basis.
If that would be true then we should change something in the council's mission and objectives. Anybody with the skills and the support should be able to be a good council member without having to set aside job, family, friends or even their current community activities. Otherwise it's not sustainable.

Luckily, I think what you say is only partielly true. Being a Council member has its obligations but (at least as I see it as humble community member and voter) they are more in terms of qualitative contributions rather than volume of work. Still the qualitative contributions do take time and are not easy to handle (agreed!) specially when your head and your voice is more visible for time-consuming questions and criticism (that are part of the work, true).

But you guys were already investing a lot of time following maemo.org & ITt and doing community related stuff (GA's thousands of posts, timsamoff's UI Guidelines, Jaffa's http://www.maemopeople.org , qole's Debian advocacy, Kees' support in maemo-developers and Mamona... these are just a % of all what you did). And you keep being busy now that are council members, which is good.

But is all this busy-ness tied to the council membership? I don't think so, and this is why I think it's important to separate maemo.org sprints (where everybody can join and commit to a task) from pure council work (that only you 5 guys will do).

I claim 3-4h a week as an average is enough to be a good council member. Some weeks you get more work, some others there is less happening. [The number comes from the 1001 discussions in the GNOME Foundation board and other organizations where active and busy people are elected and can't avoid being more active and more busy...]
 

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