Nokia is Nokia; Maemo is Nokia. Maemo SW is a product division within Nokia (much like Qt SW) that develops Maemo (which is the software platform for Nokia tablet devices). The relationship is between Maemo SW and the community.

By paying attention to what the community is saying. A large part of a council member's work involves watching Talk, watching the mailing lists, watching IRC, watching Planet, and generally watching any place where Maemo things are happening. In order for a council member to do their job, they need to be as informed as possible (since this it isn't realistic for one person to be completely informed about everything going on in Maemoland, this is why we have five).

Now, let's make two things absolutely clear here:

First, maemo.org is not Nokia. Nokia pays the bills for the servers and the personnel, but maemo.org is community owned and run. This means maemo.org staff members generally set their own agendas with input from the community (which is primarily filtered through the council) and other maemo.org staff members (you saw this process in the sprint meeting yesterday).

Second, paying attention does not mean doing whatever the loudest and squeakiest wheel says whenever it says it. When you elect people to the council, you're picking people who you think will best represent your views. This means that you're essentially telling these people that, "Yes, I generally agree with your opinions and I'd like you to represent me." You're enabling them to make decisions without running a vote on every issue that comes up. This reduces bureaucratic overhead (not having to run a community-wide vote every time a small issue comes up) and lets the people who are making it their job to be informed about what's happening in the community make those smaller decisions.

If your views and the views of the council members you voted for begin to drift, then you're free to try to vote them out next election (this is why the terms are relatively short) or try running yourself.

No they don't. What it means is that if you're interested in following everything that the council is up to, then you need to be following -community and IRC as, by default, that's where council-related business will be discussed. Council-related business, however, is not anything and everything vaguely community-related.

This is a technical issue, and the vBulletin integration will solve it. For now, -community will be the default place for council discussions. There aren't really any compelling reasons to change the existing arrangement in the short term and several disadvantages to such a change.

General #maemo chatter, no, but the really important stuff always goes on in #maemo-meeting and always gets a log on the website. mgedmin kindly provides logs of #maemo.

The mailing list archives are all available online (in at least 3 different formats, I might add). They're quite easy to follow if you subscribe to them (easier than the forums, actually), and no different from forums if you're following them on Gossamer Threads.

I'm not sure if you've noticed my Community Highlights column, but it covers everything that I believe to be relevant to community interests (unfortunately it's on hold for thanks to real life requirements). Of course this sort of thing will never be absolutely complete (what one person thinks is relevant is not what another person may think is relevant, but that's one thing about a community you have to understand—your own opinion isn't necessarily everybody else's opinion).

Me, personally, a lot (there's some additional detail—and a lot of really classy comments—in my Mobile Tablets! interview). I consider staying on top of what's happening in the community to be a council activity, and I do a lot of that (there really isn't much Maemo-related that gets past me). Facilitation activities basically involve being involved in discussions and sometimes contacting certain people directly, which is also something I do a lot of. Sprint activities as chair will take between 3-6 hours of your time per month (this is Jaffa's job this time around, though) and about 2 hours of your time as a regular council member.

Anything else Maemo-related I do (Bugsquad triaging, wiki editing, and such) take a lot of my time, but aren't really council activities.

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.

The a council member's role in the community is one of facilitation, this means that a lot of council work will take place in the background where it's not highly visible. A council member's job is to help make the community to grow and run smoothly, and make sure things are happening by connecting the right people and removing roadblocks where possible.

There's very little (really, nothing, in fact) that can be attributed singularly to the council's efforts, but almost nothing that it hasn't had a hand in helping along. The best sign of the success of council efforts is a community that is producing new things and growing. If you want examples of the council's success, I'd recommend asking around a bit to find out where the council's been helping.

Really, people on the council are already highly involved individuals and much of what they do they'd be doing regardless of whether they were on the council or not. Council-related activities are neither glamorous nor highly visible, and they really shouldn't be—a strong community is not one that's entirely driven by one five-member body.

If you want an example, though, I think HAVAPlayer is a fairly good one (demonstrating both the behind-the-scenes and unglamorous nature of the role). If you recall, HAVAPlayer for Maemo was initially distributed as a .deb through their website, but Niels and I worked to convince them that putting their application into Extras would be a benefit to them and their users, then Niels assisted them with getting it into Extras and now it's available for all tablet owners with Extras enabled on their devices.