maemo.org Community Council
 

One of the things I suggested during the maemo.org brainstorm for the 100 Days community action plan was the creation of a Community Council. The idea is relatively simple:

• Nokia often ask for the "community's input" or the "community to lead on xxxx" - however, there's no mechanism for identifying what the community actually wants, so...
• 5 members of the maemo.org community would be elected by the wider community to act as a council.
• This council would help channel the community's voice to Nokia, and vice-versa; so - for example - represent high level issues to Nokia during IRC meetings with qgil; help define brainstorming processes and action plans (if they happen in future); help organise logo competitions etc.
• The council would be for the community - it would not be in the employ of Nokia, and would be entirely acting on the community's behalf. If the council started acting unilaterally, they could fairly easily be booted out next election :-)

This now has some buy in (including from qgil) but needs a big vote of confidence from the wider Maemo community to really be useful. If it's just pushed through by lardman, GeneralAntilles and myself, it can hardly claim to be a Community Council until the nominees all get thousands and thousands of votes.

Assuming that won't happen, I'd like to ask those of you interested in the maemo.org community (developers, collaborating users, bug tracking, software downloads etc.) two things:

1. Whether this is a good idea (using the poll above)
2. Any suggestions or improvements to the process (using the wiki discussion page)

Many thanks in advance,

Andrew

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Hi guys!

I'm a pretty new N800 owner. Got mine from a frustrated Windows user ... and i love it :)

But on the subject: i really encourage you to appoint a "good dictator" I'm contributing code for quite a few OSS Community Projects, and IMHO a good working OSS hierarchy is:

- a leading community speaker (he should be a N8x0 hacker veteran) there are quite a few candidates here on this forum... This community speaker should not be directly responsible to the community by elections, but should stay the speaker until the other council members decide to appoint a new speaker. This speaker should not be a "primus inter pares". The perfect thing would be to find a "good dictator" who takes care of the community and organizes the efforts.

- the community council: elected members who help the speaker to make up his / her mind and rise awareness for community subjects.


These were my 2 Cent, all the best & thanks a million for whoever uses his spare time to make this administrative job ;)

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Suffice to say, if there's a large vote for the second option, but no concrete changes suggested on the wiki discussion page I'd be very inclined to consider those votes as option 1 ones ;-)

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Isn't the lack of comments here and even the amount of votes in this poll a bit surprising? So many individual comments in the lines of Nokia hear this, Nokia watch that, I had expected more discussion here when the time comes to structure this community voice and collaboration with Nokia.

I'm not criticizing, just trying to understand why. Is it because everybody agrees and is not worth discussing? The opposite? It's because you think such council would be useless? Or perhaps because you think that topics discussed around maemo.org are not interesting to you?

Please comment if you haven't before. You will help Jaffa, GeneralAntilles, lardman and others (like me) understand what needs to be improved in this boostrapping process.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I'm totally agree with the idea of council! Sorry for silence, missed the theme somehow :) I think it's the great way to make some kind of "docking bay" between Community and the Company. Council fill form a community request in some understandable for Nokia guys form and will translate and spread Announcements in some more formal and explained form for the Community. It's very great idea!

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Well, the poll's open for a while yet, and I wanted to think a bit before I say anything; I plan to provide input, just this is serious enough to be worth thinking first (for once).

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I try to find out atm why I myself am not too enthusiastic about the topic. ;) (Although I support the idea and voted 'yes' right now.)

Maybe it's because the whole thing is at the edge of bureaucracy.- We acknowledge it's useful, maybe even necessary, but it's not fun. :D

Maybe it's because most of us (including myself) don't have a clear vision of how this could work. It may be easier to really discuss it once it started according to the rules set up now. A year or so later, people may have a clear understanding of what's going on, and they will have an opinion about certain details.

I'd say: Yes, I want this. Yes, the rules are good enough to start with. Just do it.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Isn't it simply because people don't come daily to this forum ? And that this topic is kinda buried without any front page news on the major websites ?

I've especially registered to this forum to vote on this poll.

But just as benny1967 said, there is no real clarity in this topic about how things would work so that "non-maemo-hackers" could express their opinion, suggestions and ideas to the "council".

My main concern is the meaning of the word "community". I'm currently not planning to spend my time on this forum nor to write any application for the tablet (mainly because I could not find enough information about python programming on the device) but I have some suggestions of things that I'd like to see. And I guess that's the case of many people who find that bugzilla is not user friendly enough.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

There's an email thread on maemo-developers (which was taken over by Darius) for people to discuss what they'd like to see (well really it's a pointer to the wiki pages where they can say what they think).

Please do comment (and a lack of Python docs for the device is something the community could address, or at least point you in the right direction)

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Great idea!

Aflegg for president. :D

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

In other forums, I've seen a feature that can set a thread to be mandatorily-viewed. So the next time a user returns to the forum, he has to view a particular thread (just once) before being allowed to pull up any other forum content.

@Reggie: Can we set this thread to be like that so we can raise the community's awareness of this topic and get their input?

PS: We may need to add an "I don't care" option in the poll if we do that btw.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

There's some clarification that needs to be done here, but my own personal view is that it takes a little bit of involvement to be a part of a community, and that a "community member" is slightly different from a "user". A "user" simply has to have a device, nothing more, while the term "community member" implies some level of involvement (not much involvement, but a little)—maybe posting on the forums or mailing lists a bit, thumbing some Planet articles, filing a bug or two, etc.

As such, two points should probably be clarified, it's (in my opinion) really a maemo.org Community Council, so the focus is on maemo.org community issues. I don't believe its job is to play focus-group research for Nokia, as Nokia is perfectly capable of figuring out what "consumers" are interested in on its own. Rather, the council should be concerned with the maemo.org community interests, helping to communicate those interests to Nokia (and help communicate Nokia's positions back to the community), and acting as a source of leadership for the maemo.org community on things like the Maemowiki Action Group, the Bugsquad, brainstorms, etc.

The council's job is not to act as a channel for feature requests (though some community issues might fall under this heading), as this is the area currently covered by Bugzilla (and, hopefully in the future, a Maemo IdeaStorm). The council may help focus Nokia's attention on certain issues in Bugzilla or on the mailing lists, forums, etc., but it is not a feature request channel.

Basically, what this means, is that the council doesn't and can't claim to represent all consumer/user voices, but, instead, is focused on the issues of community members.

This is simply my own personal view of what the council could be, though.

Please don't. That sounds like a really good way to generate ill-will.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I agree completely that the council is necessary. Organization is a key piece to obtain the success, and I think that the maemo community has already an age to start being organized and working more productively, and the council can play a good paper in it.

On the roles that the council will have to do, the general lines are explained in the wiki, but I am sure that in the future there will be more situations/problems arising where the council has something that to do.

My only hope is this doesn't turn into a Gnome elections type where some people attack to others and so on.

Remember, we all are here for fun :)

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I'm also one of those cautious yes voters, and my feelings are basically the same as Benny1967.
. I'll add some of my ideas. Maybe it's the word 'council'.It makes me think of politics. How about something with 'team' in it? Furthermore I suggest to communicate clearly:

- What kind of problems it is going to solve (use cases)
- A definition of the relation to Nokia, how much say it has and in which matters.

I can imagine that for newcomers not familiar with this community based approach it can be a bit confusing. It took some time for me to figure out what the relation was between Bugzilla, Maemo.org, ITT, Tableteer and Nokia, and whether ITT was paid by Nokia or just some enthusiasts. So when it is stated that the council is about Maemo.org it should be clear how ITT fits in and what Maemo.org is about, i.e. not about feature requests and not a help desk.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Aflegg is no more :-)

More seriously, the proposed community chair role shouldn't have any real additional power over anyone else on the council; unlike a president.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I read this a little bit, here's some quick side comments:

A) Where is the council going to be based such that the community shall see they exist? Will there be a possible tie-in to itT (such as a “community news” button between the software and gallery buttons (only asking because this is the site that I use))?

B) If I was actively interested in this, would want to know what the council is currently doing (“starting the logo contest”) and how/where to apply (and maybe also good to know that karma etc helps get in, but that's not as important to me)

C) It's cool that you have a good idea of who you want to do the voting, but are enough of these community members going to be actively involved enough to be willing to vote? I'm thinking yes, but don't see any ideas to make sure this happens

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Likely from maemo.org. More specifically, from the wiki (think something along the lines of the Maemowiki Action Group), maemo-community mailing list (whenever it opens) and #maemo. There will probably be Community Council forum topics here, but it's not really something that I see being tied into itT very directly. Not really that high-profile and not really that itT-oriented.

Probably a "maemo.org Community Council" page on the wiki.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I agree with GeneralAntilles - if nothing else, minutes of council meetings should be published; and the council should be very active on maemo-community and particular initiatives (whatever they may be) would be announced in the best way possible. i.e. planet, ITT threads, maemo-announce (perhaps).

The single best way of keeping track of everything related to Maemo, though, is to watch the planet.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

Any more interested parties want to add some more input? :)

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I think by the end of the first sprint/timebox/period we can tie down the process and start soliciting nominations. It looks like we've got a consensus!

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

I hope Reggie gets this into the news. That way it will get more views and hopefully more votes and replies.

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

well in my case i would think that it would be a good idea...i wanted to wait sometime before i said anything as for the people who haven't spoken yet...consider them voices of assent :)

Re: maemo.org Community Council
 

A suitable time has passed since the first council was elected. For those of you who felt the voting system was sub-optimal, a task has been allocated to define a better approach in the next four weeks.

Details here:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...338#post239338