I've been meaning to put this to you guys ages ago, sorry for taking so long but…

Why not look at merging the organisational and server infrastructure of Maemo.org & the MeR project instead of going it alone?*
Seems like a total "win win" situation to me, much larger pool of human & other resources at your disposal.
MeR derivatives are much more likely attract corporate funding going forward, but Maemo derivatives are still a much larger/stronger community.
So the latter could provide much needed user funding/contributions at times when things get a bit lean or between dips in corporate funding etc.
Longer-term MeR derivatives will be a valuable lifeline towards ensuring that Maemo derivatives can continue to be strong/healthy.
MeR will benefit thanks to much more cross-pollination, plus a gradual shift of Maemo users to one or more MeR derivatives will occur.

The way I see it, maemo.org could basically become the doco & support wing of MeR, Maemo derivatives could still be a very important sub-set of that.
Sure maemo.org members would have to deal with the fact that there may be slightly less chance for them to get into the council or board, but that's a minor issue.
Apparently council have discussed it all very briefly with MeR, but MeR's happy to discuss all the pros cons in much more detail.
None of this has to happen as part of the transition if it's too late to change tack now, this is something that we can take our time with.
I think this would be the perfect situation when it comes to domain/site, being able to use merproject.org makes sense on so many levels LT.
Of course, we may always have to keep maemo.org around for certain practical/legal reasons, but for newer content mercommunity/project.org just makes sense.

I wish I'd put this to you guys much earlier, it's probably too late for you to see it in time for the meeting.
(which I wont be attending, already 230am here, meeting's at 5am my time).
But nevertheless it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on how/why it was ruled out so readily with little close inspection.
Perhaps it never crossed your mind, perhaps you came to the conclusion that it's a detrimental approach overall?

Cheers.
*there could be variations on that too i.e. organisationally one entity, but separate infra etc.