Here is my naive and inevitably unpopular few cents...

I haven't seen much consideration of the purpose of the meego versus maemo forums. My perception of this issue is probably very different, and perhaps ill-informed, but for the foreseeable future at least (and perhaps indefinitely), the meego community focus is almost exclusively on development. Versus here, where we have accumulated a lot of end users. When you consider the direction meego is going in (as in, multiple devices, potentially quite different UIs.. a 'base' OS for a wide variety of platforms and form factors) I would consider it absolutely disastrous to try and implement an all encompassing forum which caters for novice end users of individual devices. I cant see how it could possibly become anything other than a big mess. Meego faces significant enough challenges; multiple architectures, radically varying use cases, licensing/openness stuff, etc. These are big issues, and for the time being, this bread and butter stuff needs to be done.

So who reckons its a good idea to bring 30,000+ Maemo users to the party... many of whom are inactive, potentially uninterested end users who (I'm sorry, this comes across harsh) wont yet have any productive input towards the new project.

If Meego takes off, we're going to see it on phones, netbooks, probably slate PC's and even in cars. Exposure to a huge number of end users. Now lets put all of those users in the same place where the development stuff happens

I think the brief for the new forum/community needs to be carefully considered, because I fear it wont be compatible with what tmo has become. Dont get me wrong, I like this place, and I love the ethos, but something like this wouldn't work with meego, if meego becomes what the blokes from Intel and Nokia want it to. So far, this forum and its members have resulted from 4 (main) hardware models, and a handful of OS revisions (dont get me wrong, its much more than that now, but I'm stating what Nokia gave us). So imagine what it would look like if you had dozens of devices.. which vary (potentially) significantly in terms of form factor, interface and architecture, and the resultant many tens/hundreds of thousands of users which would appear with their irrelevant hardware related issues, should meego go mainstream.

I'm sorry, I am a pessimist, and I would like to be proved wrong!

I do think meego should have a forum, definitely. But I consider it a very separate entity, and so I don't think that forum should be modeled particularly closely on this one, and I absolutely don't think it should be merged.

Sorry for cynicism, and for being off topic.

*happyblob crawls back under rock*

Relevant to this discussion: my take on the meego.com target audience.

http://wiki.meego.com/Who%27s_who#Wh...eeGo_community
http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/mee...ry/000028.html

I think Designers/Artists should be represented as well - I mean, what would MeeGo be without the likes of our design community here?

This comic comes to mind:

I doesn't seem to me like you're a pessimist, it seems to me you just fail at concepts like 'use cases', 'usability focus' and possibly 'agile development'. "Let us do our work in peace". Oh, and you might possibly think you're more qualified at coming up with solutions than the combined efforts of thousands of tech centric professionals and power users.

This is a resource you're rejecting. Of course, it's a resource that would take some effort to tap into, but if you do, you get better products.

I'm the pessimist. I don't think you're going to make better products. Because you waste opportunities. It's thinking like yours that gives end products like the system restore on my Acer tablet.

If they had a user involved at some point in the process, the alternatives you got would not be to choose between

(c) ontinuance or (a) borted.

I don't see the birth of a meego.com forum as the death of talk.maemo.org!!

tmo is indeed a very interesting place with a lot of value. Why not keeping it to discuss about those Nokia products with Maemo/MeeGo inside.

Nokia will come with new MeeGo devices and there will be a place where users (including MeeGo hardcore developers, which are users too) will want to meet and discuss whatever about them. I can't imagine a better place than the current talk.maemo.org for that.

Let's just set visible gateways to meego.com forums for those clearly needing something more, or something else. For instance, no need for Development forum. Many Community and MeeGo/Harmattan topics can just move there...


Stskeeps: noted and I will add designers to the wiki page.

volt, the involvement of users in development is crucial. It's just that as soon as they get involved they become contributors. If you just want to gather feedback you can just lurk or even drop in a user forum and ask for feedback (like e.g. Vitaly in the MS Outlook support thread).

Are you advocating two forums to discuss Meego - one for hardcore MeeGo subject matter, and another (t.m.o.) to discuss Nokia MeeGo devices?

That sounds like the quickest and most sure fire way to confuse and bamboozle existing and future owners and divide the community. A seriously bad idea IMHO.

Either kill t.m.o. and bring it across as an archive of legacy postings to MeeGo, or leave it as a Nokia Maemo-only discussion forum aimed at legacy Maemo (and not MeeGo) devices.

Eventually Nokia will lose complete interest in t.m.o. and the problem will then be what to do with all the useful information in this forum as the devices will remain viable for many years, which is why bringing it across to MeeGo *now* makes more sense to me.

I think the hard part is that when you start creating device/manufacturer specific sections to MeeGo forums, it has the potential to become a real mess. It might be a good idea now, but what about a couple of years forward? Will it have separate sections for each device type(phones, netbooks, tablets, media phones, in car infotainment, etc.) each then divided to manufacturers, all of which again divided into devices/OS versions and so on?

Ubuntu Forum Community

Device specific (or in the case of Ubuntu, architecture specific) discussions co-exist with technical discussions.

Similar story with other communities (eg. TiVo) - hardcore technical discussion co-exists with banter and chat. It's not that big of a problem, and a price worth paying to keep the community "together".

MeeGo should have a Nokia devices sub-forum (which could be broken down further by individual device) and discussions should co-exist equally with hardcore techie users.

I really wouldn't recommend splitting the community artificially such that one forum (MeeGo) is "elitist" and free of "noise" while t.m.o. is left for less technical discussion.

If techie users want to avoid the noise they can just ignore the sub-fora they're not interested in.

It can be organised any way that is felt appropriate. If at some stage it is felt that there are too many sub-forums it's not difficult to re-organise and reduce the number of sub-forums.

The organisation of all forums should reviewed on a regular basis to ensure they remain relevant and appropriate for the members and topics under discussion. Meego should be no different - as new devices (or just device categories, ie. netbooks, desktops, phones etc.) appear the decision can be made to add a new sub-forum, or not.

If individual devices are given sub-forums then as these devices become legacy devices with little or no discussion then these forums can be hived off to keep the number of forums manageable.

Creating sub-forums for each device might make sense right now, but if MeeGo takes off and more manufacturers come on board that may not remain the case, but it's all manageable.

Fully agreed. Insulating developers from users only encourages "ivory tower" thinking and removes the migration path from end-userdom to bug reporter to tester to developer that the whole open source ecosystem lives on.