Yes, but maemo.org community? Because, clearly, it's a maemo.org Community Council, and you can't really be part of a maemo.org community if you don't participate in maemo.org.

I read 'Maemo Community council election'.

Hrm, I see, well, this is clearly incorrect. Apologies for the confusing (I blame Dave ). It is most definitely a maemo.org council election.

I've emailed the community list about having it fixed.

Hi all,

For info, I helped Ernesto find his vote (which he had received) - problem sorted now.

Dave.

The discussion on the community list cleared things up nicely, thanks GAN

To clarify: the council is intended to represent the Maemo community (not those with accounts on maemo.org). We need to have some measure of what it means to be part of the community - the initial proposal was "karma > 25 in a maemo.org account" - that was considered excessively strict and arbitrary by a vocal part of the IRC channel & community mailing list, and so the karma requirement was scrapped.

There are discussions underway, and input is needed, on what the best way to measure community participation - ITT thanks and posts should be included in karma, the karma measure for bugzilla, mailing lists, blogs, development, the wiki, IRC, and general participation in the community all need to be polished, with perhaps more complicated rules to measure the relative weight of contributions.

One point worth making is that obviously (to me, at least) just having a maemo.org account shouldn't be enough to be considered "part of the maemo community".

So, the council *will* represent the Maemo community, but for this first election, a maemo.org account was a requirement. Future elections may have different requirements, or perhaps karma will evolve to the point where we can properly measure participation, and maemo.org and itt accounts can be merged? I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud.

Dave.

Cleared things up, how, exactly? This statement below seems to directly contradict the point I made on the list. . . .

My personal opinion is that council is not intended to represent everything that makes up the "Maemo Community" as this is neither realistic nor, in some cases, desirable. . . .

I'm not exactly sure where you got this from any of the statements I've made. The maemo.org Community Council cannot represent the entire Maemo Community.

The winkie was intended to communicate that it did the opposite - as I said in my last mail on the mailing list thread, there is no clear consensus.

I'd be interested in hearing cases where it's not desirable.

I respectfully disagree I just think we need a better idea of who makes up the Maemo community, so that we can have an accurate electorate and a representative council.

Dave.

I wanna be community dogcatcher, but it wasn't an option this time.

There's always the next election.

There's no such thing as a "Maemo community". How would you define a "Maemo community"? Am I part of the Maemo community? What if I'm active here, am interested in the further development of Maemo, own 2 tablets but explicitely say "I don't want to be part of a community because I believe in anarchy"? (I don't say this, it's just the first example I made up.)

You need to have some means of defining a membership... not only because of the elections, but to define a community per se. Not defining it might be enough for wannabe journalists who talk about "the linux community", but everything serious needs clear definitions.

So if there's no such thing as a "Maemo community", what do we have?
People who care enough to actively participate and communicate and contribute... using some web service.

So we could say we have:

• the community at maemo.org,
• the community at itt,
• the community at http://n800.de/ (an english speaking service will never even be close to representing "the community" in the broader sense that some think of; never forget foreign language resources)
• the community at http://tabletblog.com/
• etc. etc.

These we can identify. You can tell who's part of which community and who isn't.


Only thing you have to do now is decide:

Does the council represent a developer community? Then it's a council for the community at maemo.org .... While not necessarily each developer needs to be registered there, it's reasonable to believe that those who wish to be represented by the council and want to vote will sign up just for this one reason.

Or does the council represent a wider community, including curious users and people who are just helpful? Then itd be nice to include as many of the communities listed above as possible, forming a superset.

(You could, of course, go the other way round: Say that by definition maemo.org is the Maemo community because of its name and who wants to be part of it needs to sign up. That's a very logical approach, too. Just like in real life I can't be part of an association I never even contacted. Still, it leads to the same result: There is no "Maemo community" somewhere in virtual space, there's only maemo.org, itt, n800.de, ....)

In another words, if nominated, Benny will not run. If elected, he will not serve.

I vote for Benny.