Maemo Council has two proposals that it is publishing for consideration, comment and refinement by the community. The first proposal involves the promotion of projects that are believed to be important to the community and will meet minimum criteria of openness and self-governance. The second proposal is for Council to step back from involvement in technical issues in lieu of project governance.


For the last few months, the community has been sorting out the future of maemo.org. After initial discussion by the new Council, two changes are proposed at this time. First, we propose steps to better organize and manage Maemo-related development while at the same keeping intact the Maemo community's history of openness and inclusiveness. Second, Council will refocus its activities and attempt to establish mutually beneficial relations with other open source communities such as Meego, Qt, and Debian. These proposals are intended to improve the overall functioning of the community so that it can continue into the future.

1) Software Development
Council proposes to promote one or more significant and strategic SW development projects within the community so as to accelerate and encourage participation by more developers in those projects. Council will ensure that these projects receive the necessary infrastructure to achieve their goals and may provide them with direct access to some parts of the infrastructure administration. The projects will maintain their own governance on a meritocratic basis by those community members involved in the projects rather than community wide. The governance may, but need not, take the commonly known form of a Technical Steering Group (TSG). All technical decisions will be made by the project governance. Council will not interfere with the selection of TSG members or technical decisions made by the projects. However, the promoted projects will be required to be operated and managed openly, and to include any maemo member in good standing in the project.
2) Council Responsibilities
Council will step back from software development and refocus slightly to concentrate on collecting feedback widely from all community members, and to facilitating opportunities for members to contribute to the community by, for example, establishing volunteer positions such as for the former webmaster, etc. It is hoped that meritocratic project governance will free Council from having to address and resolve certain development related issues, leading to a quicker and technically better resolution of those issues. Council will continue to be generally responsible for managing the website, domain name, software licensing, IPR, and infrastructure and to serve as the point of contact with Nokia, and now for other companies and other open source projects as well.

Council member Jeremiah notes that he objects to the proposals to the extent that they seek to change the governance of the community.