maemo.org - Talk - Ask the Council! History thread

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Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Estel (Post 1140159)

SD69, seconding freemangordon's question - are there any procedures specified, when council member(s) disappear, without any sign of life? If there aren't any, maybe we should create some *now*? In my opinion, under current "technological" status, 2 weeks of total absence without any prior warning or even small info like "I get hit by asteroid yesterday, so I'm using cafe/stole/whatever net and I'm going to have my connection repaired in 2 weeks" is enough to "delete" a Council member. Especially, that cadence is only 6 months total. What others thing about that?]

I looked and there are no procedures for replacing absent council members.

---

So, let me summary current situation, AIUI. SD69 is one and only Council member left, other pointed their interest into other projects, without any pre- or -post warning. X-Fade have us in a*s, because he is paid by Nokia, and Nokia have us in a*s (as whole, 8mm not talking about certain individuals).

SD69, have I missed or misunderstood something? If no, what about possible ideas to get out of this nasty situation? Despite circumstances, I think (and feel) that Maemo development got quite nice momentum now, and it would be pity to waste that.

My idea - resolving missing council members problem by ending their cadence (giving them a week and another message spam, to give a chance to respond), and "quick" election afterward. Immediately starting process of "gaining independence" from Nokia funds - by creating foundation (probably not under Maemo name, due to trademarks), fundraising, and paying on our own things, that definitely need to be paid-positions. Getting other functions "occupied" by volunteers (this one is de facto realisation of plan took by current council, yet never really started beyond point of brainstorm "what positions we need to have").
=
finally getting rid of "teams", that have us in a*s, cause they're not paid by us, and replacing them with people/teams paid by us directly (if necessary), and voluntary counterparts, where applicable.

NEXT: After establishing stable structures, depending or success (or lack of) of fundraising, choose major "milestone" projects, that need to be supported, and doing so by all possible means (not only banner). Where absolutely necessary, consider financial grants/contracts (not necessary huge ones, depend on money raised).

/Estel

I looked and there are no procedures for replacing absent council members. I hope they return soon. But even if they don't, as I said after the last election, I have no problem with you or another non-council member lining up a team of trustworthy volunteers. We need at least a webmaster, a sysadmin, and a few really good people to manage the repos and package promotion. (X-Fade may be unresponsive at times, but he knows this stuff well.) And for a foundation, there needs to be consensus on where - Finland, UK, DE, USA?

And even so, I think at the end, we still have the challenge of getting Nokia's cooperation. I'll try to post again with some more comments when I have more time.

Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by SD69 (Post 1139950)

Nokia (and by extension, Nemein) is not so much interested in helping maemo users anymore.

I haven't been following things closely, but I thought Nokia was still paying for roughly one full-time person to support maemo.org, has that changed?

In any case, if the powers that be are being unresponsive (for whatever reasons, however valid or not) the first order of business should be to establish access to willing and able community members to get things done.

Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by lma (Post 1140222)

I haven't been following things closely, but I thought Nokia was still paying for roughly one full-time person to support maemo.org, has that changed?

Quote:

I'd like to ask:
* What council members can do?
* Who has permissions for modifing (managing) maemo.org website?
* Who can configure repository.maemo.org?
* Who can "importing packages" into maemo.org/packages interface?
* Who are admins of maemo.org infrastructure?

Council only has permissions for its own wiki page, etc. Wikimasters, forum mods, and other high level permissions are selected from the community at large. Nemein controls the maemo.org website and infrastructure, and X-Fade is the person most often responsible for the repos and package promotion.

Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by SD69 (Post 1140390)

We've asked to quantify the amount of support so that we can prioritize and apportion the time spent on maemo.org. But we've never received a thorough answer.

Right. That is, of course, absurd :-(

Quote:

The contract may not even be so specific as to state X hours or FTEs per month at all; it may just require Nemein to provide support services to maemo.org.

Well, Nokia/Nemein should clarify that asap. Because if the whole thing is (as it increasingly appears to be) essentially unsupported apart from someone paying the ISP bills, we're all better off migrating elsewhere right now, before it collapses with no one around who knows enough of the setup and/or has access to fix it.

Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by SD69 (Post 1140390)

Yes, Nokia has a paid contract that is still in place. We've asked to quantify the amount of support so that we can prioritize and apportion the time spent on maemo.org. But we've never received a thorough answer. The contract may not even be so specific as to state X hours or FTEs per month at all; it may just require Nemein to provide support services to maemo.org.

Council only has permissions for its own wiki page, etc. Wikimasters, forum mods, and other high level permissions are selected from the community at large. Nemein controls the maemo.org website and infrastructure, and X-Fade is the person most often responsible for the repos and package promotion.

Some people from Community (Council?, other person?) should have permissions for community maemo.org parts - e.g. community extras repository.

Why only ONE persion is able to chage something on maemo (e.g. fix broken community repository)?

I think this MUST be changed very very quicky, becuase unmaintainable site is not for developers...

Re: Ask the Council!

A few months ago there were voices we should wait as long as nokia gives us support but now it looks like this was a mistake. We can not wait longer. The things that happen to the community indicate that there is absolotely no interest in us as maemo community. I followe IRC logs every day and looking at Pali who is pinging X fade over and over makes me angry. This isn't the way it should be. I'm too old to be treated like this and I also belive that we can handle it by our own powers.

Re: Ask the Council!

Another thing, that can't be omitted here, is fact that whole talk.maemo.org is also controlled by one person - Reggie - and Nokia (AFAIK) pays bills for hosting etc. Reggie is much more contactable/responsive/trustworthy/ etc. than X-Fade/Nemein as whole, but still, such "one man control all" should be changed ASAP.

What if Reggie get hit by the bus tomorrow, with some forum infrastructure critical error day-after-tomorrow? counting on how fast Nokia is acting (and how thoroughly ;) ), we would stay without this form of communication for ~6 months.

SD69, could You - as (one man) Council, i.e. Maemo community representative, arrange some meet-up with reggie (IRC?) and ask him, what is he planning to do, considering our plans? (i.e., should we look for another host, or he is sympathetic to independence plans and would like to support them, if no by only maintaining forum technical part etc.).

/Estel

Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by pali (Post 1140409)

Agreed, with some caveats. The person(s) from the community has to be trustworthy so that they won't neglect the repo or work for their own personal benefit instead of the community's. Also, Nemein is contractually responsible to Nokia for safeguarding the repository. Imagine if they give access to a community person who does something that irreversibly damages it. So they may be concerned about having liability to Nokia for the actions of a community person. This is not a blocker, but it has to be addressed.

Quote:

What if Reggie get hit by the bus tomorrow, with some forum infrastructure critical error day-after-tomorrow? counting on how fast Nokia is acting (and how thoroughly ), we would stay without this form of communication for ~6 months.

SD69, could You - as (one man) Council, i.e. Maemo community representative, arrange some meet-up with reggie (IRC?) and ask him, what is he planning to do, considering our plans? (i.e., should we look for another host, or he is sympathetic to independence plans and would like to support them, if no by only maintaining forum technical part etc.).

If something happened to Reggie, then Nemein would step in to continue operating the forum (although they don't have as much vbulletin expertise). Reggie has been asked about a possible post-Nokia future of the forum and he was not enthusiastic about it. He particularly did not want to give a dollar amount that the community would need to come up with to continue funding the forum (w/ ads or w/o). I assume he wants his contract with Nokia to last as long as possible, and he has no motivation for wanting to see t.m.o. convert from Nokia contract (with presumably good compensation) to a financially uncertain community. It has been discussed that the content of the forum belongs to the community, and can be exported/imported, but hopefully it won't come to that. Current issues aside I would say that Nemein is probably more intrinsically supportive of a self-governing maemo community that keeps maemo alive.

Re: Ask the Council!

I only read the last 3 pages of this thread and I'm not fully informed about the whole situation so I might be missing something but I guess we all agree that there will be no long-term future for maemo.org in its current shape.
Even if we get a positive answer for 2012 (which I doubt) we'll face the same problem in 2013 and so on.

Therefore I think it's high time to transfer all the infrastructure (forum, wiki, repositories) to a community-driven platform. Unfortunately I don't have the expertise to run such a platform on my own.
As for the financial part the approach of debianforum.de might work here too. It is totally funded via donations from the community members [1]. This requires a strong identification of the community with the platform but I think that is the case here.

[1] http://wiki.debianforum.de/Debianforum.de/Spenden

Re: Ask the Council!

Quote:

Originally Posted by lma (Post 1140402)

Right. That is, of course, absurd :-(

Well, Nokia/Nemein should clarify that asap. Because if the whole thing is (as it increasingly appears to be) essentially unsupported apart from someone paying the ISP bills, we're all better off migrating elsewhere right now, before it collapses with no one around who knows enough of the setup and/or has access to fix it.

This is my thinking as well. Council (all 3 members) is waiting for Nokia and Nemein representative to confirm a date for an IRC meeting. It will be posted if/when it is scheduled.