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

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

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 ;-)

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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)

Great idea!

Aflegg for president.