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#1
I hope Nemein will soon send out the voting ballots. In any event, here is a copy of my acceptance, which includes a proposed mission statement.


When I first ran for Community Council one year ago, I did so because of the challenges I saw posed by Nokia's embrace of WP7. While others declared this community dead and encouraged people to migrate to MeeGo, I was one of the loudest voices asking people to stay the course with maemo. I am proud of what the community has accomplished since last summer, and of the many people who have helped to build the momentum of today despite the people who have left. The number of "doers" may be drastically less than years ago, but I believe that most of the people who are still here are dedicated to having maemo-related OSS available in the future for mobile devices. The last council period was time intensive for me, but I decided to run again because the turnaround is unfinished and several of the other candidates have asked me to continue to work with them.

In my opinion, the most important thing for the community to do is to decide and clearly state what it wants to do - a mission statement - I suggest "to promote and progress the future availability of maemo-related OSS for pocketable devices"; and then plan to accomplish that mission. There are many hurdles to this and I realize that some may believe that it cannot be accomplished, but the things worth doing are rarely easy to do.

I believe that the maemo community can and should organize itself better in order to achieve its goals. The organizational structure that the community had five years ago when Nokia was pushing out a series of maemo devices is not the optimal structure for today. Maemo is in survival mode and the idea that the community should just sit back and let happen what will happen is dangerous. This is not to say that every maemo project should not be supported, but that there should be some management - nothing overwhelming but perhaps something like what is seen in other OSS projects. And everytime something is proposed, we ask ourselves - "how does the proposal further the mission statement?"

I realize that there are those who are nostalgic for the old days and want the Council to have a limited role of interfacing with Nokia. But that won't work, at least not to accomplish the mission that I propose, not when Nokia has made no indication that they will be providing any more devices for maemo-related software. The various comments about communication are a distraction from the real significant challenges, such as how to deal with Nokia and its surrogates whose goals are laudable and overlapping, but slightly different the mission statement I have proposed. When there was silence or non-cooperation, that was not for lack of communication skills, but because of underlying, background concerns. The important thing is that the challenges have been beat back over the last six months, maemo did not die after all and can move forward again.

As to other related projects and parties, I think they should be viewed in light of whether they further the mission statement. Obviously, projects like Mer/Nemo and Qt are complementary. There is the problem that maemo is partially closed, and the next software step is not maemo in a pure sense but some mashup of maemo with Mer or other projects. Other projects and parties, such as Nokia, are not quite so clearly complementary. If there is a new Nokia "meltemi" or other device that fits well with the community goals, then that will be something we work together to promote. I do believe that the lack of maemo-suitable hardware is a big hurdle for the community. Council should address this challenge proactively wherever the solutions may lie, and not have a laissez-faire approach.
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#2
Rob I'm pretty sure you will get elected to the Community council, thank you for your hard work and all the effort you have put into maemo.org. I look forward to hopefully working alongside you to help make a change.
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