Hildon Foundation Board of Directors questionnaire for candidates

[GeneralAntilles]

This is a questionnaire that I'd like to see the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors candidates respond to.* I'd like this thread to foster some discussion, so feel free to chime in with responds to candidate answers or the questions.

I will try to mirror these to the candidates page on the wiki as they are posted.

1. Where do you see maemo.org in 1 year? In 5 years?
2. What do see you as the primary role for the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors?
3. How do you envision the relationship between the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors and the Hildon Foundation Council/Maemo Community Council?
4. Are you able to attend board meetings at least monthly?
5. Do you own a Maemo device? do you (regularly) use a Maemo device? Are you at all interested in Maemo and its community? (from reinob)
6. What kind of collaboration do you expect to see from Nokia, to ensure survival of the most important assets? (from vivainio)

*Full disclosure: That includes me.

[chemist]

Chime in?

1. Home of the InternetTablet Community, including all abandoned souls and of course our phoenix Jolla (the device not the company) and its successors.

Where do you see us in 5 years?

2. A legal tool to our community, preserving and protecting.

3. Legal Representative, supporting institution, as HFC/MCC is serving the community - BoD is too. Both need to work together, harmonize on a level, to achieve what community demands are!

4. Sure...I'd guess!

5. Seriously $put-bad-words-in-here? NO, I do not own Maemo devices and I do not maintain CSSU-stable and once and for all I never had anything to do with our server move or talk.maemo.org at all! Ask anyone! O_o (just for you reinob)

6. I expect they let us die out in the cold, I hope they still bring bugfixes - some developer still loves us and brought a patch with Nokia Link to N9...

[Win7Mac]

tschingeling...

Where do you see maemo.org in 1 year? In 5 years?

• A year ahead, I'd expect the community at least as vibrant as today. We still get new members every day and I believe many maemo + meego users will stay faithful. And if our Harmattan-devices will run sailfish OS and probably even vice versa, there is a promissing 5 years perspective IMO.

What do see you as the primary role for the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors?

• Actually the HiFo-page states "The Hildon Foundation is a nonprofit organization elected by the Maemo Community to handle community oversight and infrastructure."
  I'd change it to something like "The Hildon Foundation is a nonprofit organization elected by the Maemo Community to represent it for legal and other official practices and to preserve the maemo.org infrastructure."

How do you envision the relationship between the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors and the Hildon Foundation Council/Maemo Community Council?

• As maemo.org now is completely community-driven and represented by the council, I believe the BoD should provide service for community/council demands where needed. Close collaboration is a requirement here.

Are you able to attend board meetings at least monthly?

• Well, as a freelancer you can never tell exactly till date closes, besides that I gladly am ;-)

Do you own a Maemo device? do you (regularly) use a Maemo device? Are you at all interested in Maemo and its community?

• Despite feeling a bit under-equipped here with one N9, I'm a happy camper. There actually is no alternative for me and this community with it's spirit just fascinates me. And I realized that everybody not only can, but needs to do something to actually keep this great community alive'n kickin. Like you and me, remember this little story?

What kind of collaboration do you expect to see from Nokia, to ensure survival of the most important assets?

• Some serious collaboration can't be expected I guess, because the relation seems quite screwed. But I do hope the contract once figured or somehow adjusted can finally be set effective. Though chances are low, I'd support any attempts to gain Harmattan assets wherever possible. Oh, and one fine day Nokia will give Meego a 2nd chance, acquire Jolla and we lived happily ever after... :-)

Kind regards

[GeneralAntilles]

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

1. Where do you see maemo.org in 1 year? In 5 years?

In the short term, maemo.org needs to be able to provide services to Maemo users and this should continue to be the focus for the coming year. However, I'd also like to see maemo.org pick up some of the slack Nokia is letting out with Harmattan support (even though Harmattan assets are not part of the agreements with Nokia).

I'd hope that there might be increasing activity around Jolla (or something like it) in maemo.org over the next year, but movement in that direction must be organic and does not come from dictates or secret negotiations by the board.

It is difficult to predict where maemo.org might be in 5 years, but if there is still demand for maemo.org's services for Maemo users, I expect to see it providing it.

I'd hate to see maemo.org dwindle with the waning of the Maemo Community and would love to see renewed enthusiasm around new mobile open source ventures (whatever they may be), but the board's role is not to force a direction, merely to support the organic growth of the community.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

2. What do see you as the primary role for the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors?

The Hildon Foundation exists to provide the legal and organizational support to ensure that maemo.org can operate as an independent entity. The board is there to check the legal boxes to allow donations to be collected, the infrastructure to be supported, and the council and support staff to do their jobs. It exists to support the community, rather than try to set directions for them.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

3. How do you envision the relationship between the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors and the Hildon Foundation Council/Maemo Community Council?

The council and the board should operate closely. At least one member of each body should be attending each of the other's meetings. Both bodies should be informed of the relevant bits of the other's private email discussions (where NDAs or other sensitive subjects are involved) where possible.

The council is the representative body for the Maemo Community. The board exists to support the council in its role, offering advisement and fulfilling legal requirements.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

4. Are you able to attend board meetings at least monthly?

The nature of my employment makes it nearly impossible to attend meetings at work, but I can definitely schedule around it.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

5. Do you own a Maemo device? do you (regularly) use a Maemo device? Are you at all interested in Maemo and its community? (from reinob)

I own a whole stack of Maemo devices (2x 770, 2x N800, 4x N900, 1x N950). I do not use any of them regularly anymore as I'm currently using a BlackBerry Z10 as my primary mobile device. I'm planning on buying a Jolla device whenever they happen to ship, however.

The Maemo community introduced me to Linux and maemo.org is where I cut my teeth in open source. I've made many friends in this community (and a few enemies ), learned skills, discovered my love of writing, and had awesome adventures in far-away places. There will always been a special place in my heart for Maemo and its community. Why else would anybody run for this position? :P

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

6. What kind of collaboration do you expect to see from Nokia, to ensure survival of the most important assets?(from vivainio)

Expect? None. Most of the people with expertise or association with maemo.org seem to have moved on.

I'd like to see some assistance from Nokia in chasing down any loose ends leftover from Nemein's maintenance and handover contracts (given the state that maemo.org was handed over to the community in, I'm not sure the terms of the contract were fulfilled).

More generally, more assistance from Nokia in providing assistance in maemo.org-related discussions where a bunch-of-people-on-the-internet lack the leverage (like the Nemein issues).

I'd also like to explore options for maemo.org to take on supporting Harmattan assets if Nokia is just going to jettison them out of the airlock.

[reinob]

Originally Posted by chemist

5. Seriously $put-bad-words-in-here? NO, I do not own Maemo devices and I do not maintain CSSU-stable and once and for all I never had anything to do with our server move or talk.maemo.org at all! Ask anyone! O_o (just for you reinob)

10 points for attempting to circumvent the bad-word filter!

Seriously, those questions are just a low-pass filter. Unfortunately, there are cases where it might become effective.

Cheers.

[woody14619]

FWIW, I've posted my replies on the wiki page.

[Win7Mac]

Just updated my candidate declaration and post #3 here.

[fw190]

Well it seems to me that I'm the only one that is left. I nominetade myself when there were only 3 people and we needed 4 so 3 could get elected. I have never thought of myself as someone in a board but if I would get ellected (I hope not as 5 other candidates are much better) I would od my best to sort the easy things out like the comunication and information for the community in all maters related to HiFo and cooperatio with CC and so on. I like to now how things are here and there and I think that people deserve to just now what is uder the hood of the Board

[Jaffa]

I'll point to my acceptance and thoughts as a first pass.

With regards to the questions:

Where do you see maemo.org in 1 year? In 5 years?

In one year? Probably very similar to now. The N9 was announced two years ago today (if you ignore timezones). The Jolla device(s) are coming soon but - with the best will in the world - I suspect their initial impact will be low. It'll grow the community a little, and organically.

Hopefully, we'll be planning the 10 year anniversary of the Nokia 770 to be celebrated in May 2015.

In five years? Who knows. So much has changed in the past five years it's impossible to say. The only person who could probably get elected to the BoD and set out any sort of vision for maemo.org would be Mark Shuttleworth: he's got the resources needed to actually achieve what he sets out to do. (Note, that I think some of the problems with the previous Board has been the chasing of any possible "sugar daddy". The suggestion that maemo.org provided the repositories for Ubuntu Phone was particularly humorous, given Canonical's experience with running large-scale deb-based "stores").

What do see you as the primary role for the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors?

Supporting the Council through experience, continuity and legal assistance.

How do you envision the relationship between the Hildon Foundation Board of Directors and the Hildon Foundation Council/Maemo Community Council?

Collaborative. As the Council has a facilitation role to the community (and people willing to step up and do something get their support); the BoD is there to facilitate and support the Council.

The Council have primacy with matters of the community, IMHO.

Are you able to attend board meetings at least monthly?

Yes.

Do you own a Maemo device? do you (regularly) use a Maemo device? Are you at all interested in Maemo and its community?

I've had less time recently to be involved in following TMO religiously, and the traffic on all the other comm channels has been dying down; but I use one of my N9s daily, with my N900 as a GSM gateway. My N950 is used for development testing. Until recently used an N810 as a GPS unit. My daughter's got an N810 on her desk (with a very natty little Hello Kitty backdrop) and I've previously had an N800 and 770 as well.

As GeneralAntilles mentioned in his nomination of me, I was involved in designing and building the very concept of the Maemo Community Council. The Maemo community feels like home.

What kind of collaboration do you expect to see from Nokia, to ensure survival of the most important assets?

I agree with Ryan, I don't expect anything. Nokia's management team is going in a direction very different to anything related to this community (though it's nice to see Asha OS continuing the visual design of Harmattan). Hopefully we can get in contact with those pushing out Harmattan updates to facilitate wherever possible - and feedback how appreciated it is. I wouldn't hold my breath on any open sourcing, though.