I agree that discussion in the community is good, but I doubt we'll get a consensus here. It may bring out a few more items or directions we didn't see before, which is always good. In the end, the final decision on direction is going to need to be decided by Council. To do that, we do need input from the community.

It is appreciated. I think the difficulty comes from the fact that sometimes you do speak as a Nokia employee, and telling the difference between "community" you and "Nokia" you can be difficult. In some communities where I've had a similar role I actually made two accounts: One for the company me, the other for the community me. It gave people a clear distinction of when I was speaking in a company role vs a personal role. While that may not be fitting for you here, perhaps something as subtle as a font or color change when speaking officially could help that?

Yes and no. Sometimes there are nuances that can be said that are not part of the public announcements but are known policies. For example, your comment on how funding cycles work, and how changes are done (assumptive renewal) are not officially announced by Nokia, but helpful to know when some community members are spooked about site funding.

This is a very hard question to answer without some type of road map into the future. Let me ask you this: Had you asked the council this question in May 2008, before the N900 was announced, what would their answer have been? My bet is they would turn and ask "when is the next device due?"

In this case, the community is facing something it's never really faced until now: Nokia has said there will not be a "next device". Without that, defining where things will be is like asking us to look into a crystal ball. We can give a plan of where we see things going, but that could change radically from unannounced changes from other groups. Be that Nokia announcing a new device, or some new player showing up.

Personally, I think the current definition is sufficient, though it could use a touch-up to include recent changes. Even with the current theme, we're not quite on target fully. We don't have solid integration with Harmattan, for example, which should have already been in the fold. (And is being worked on, thanks to many here.)

Until a new (hardware) target takes a clear lead, I don't see a community shift away from what is already being done. I do think, with the number of projects going on in 3rd party spaces, that another front runner will appear in the next year or so.

Perhaps a good start would be setting up a group (or someone taking a task) to look at what's out there, how viable it is, and see if there's a community view on what is and isn't "required" for supporting a shift to a new platform. It could be the GTA04, or the Vivaldi, or some other project. But something will come along. And when it does, that shift should be obvious, and hopefully fluid.