I'm trying really hard not to take that as an insult.

Far from my intention, sorry if insulted someone, but if you only disclose some info with just one person the odds of a leak are smaller than telling 10 persons, don't you agree ?

I also agree that would be better to tell the entire council.

I don't mean an insult from you, Valerio, sorry. I mean IF that was the reason behind the decision. Given that I was specifically asked not to speculate (as is my tendency, I realize) it makes me wonder.

But I would not have leaked anything.

I also don't know the reasons, but I know some marketing guys in other big companies and leaks are one of their worst nightmares because 'these' can ruin all their work in big announcements, on the other hand leaks are good marketing for some products . Seems that the marketing part went well, there's news about the merge everywhere.

But this is not relevant anymore, and i understand that sometimes things can only be done this way, so let concentrate in the discussion about the role of the council in the meego ecosystem.

What role do you think our current form of council can play in Meego ?

From my POV the steering group should have community representation at least, probably the whole council .

I'm sure I can think of many things we could do... and if I can ever edit the MeeGo wiki I'll certainly touch on them there... but right now there's this huge question mark looming in front of me: will it be a true council, as we more-or-less had here, or just another "working group"?

I am guessing that the 'steering group' are the Really Important People at Nokia and Intel (Ari Jaaksi, Qgil, people like that). If not, then I want to know who they are, and how they got to be the steering group. And the sooner they handover to some sort of elected group, the happier I shall be.

In my view, you can ignore whether or not Moblin has had end-users integrated into their community in the past. Yes, there may be a contrast there: Nokia has done work to specifically promote integrating engaged users into the community, and perhaps Moblin hasn't. I really don't know what they have or haven't done. Regardless, there's a key, underlying difference in that Moblin hasn't shipped a line of retail devices the way Nokia has.

This merger has clearly been in the works, or at under discussion, for quite some time. oFono and other collaborative bits point to that. Meanwhile, Nokia has, if anything, increased their embrace of users, inviting input into device manuals, running Rooftop collaboration sessions, paying community members' way to "long weekends" for documentation development, etc. There'd be no sense in that, were Nokia planning to try to lock out engaged users now.

Beyond that, why would Nokia want to push non-developers from the community now just as they are readying the release of that much anticipated, finally "ready for the mass market", step 5 of 5 device? With the release of each Maemo device, the maemo.org community has seen a progressively larger jump in size. Yes, new developers came each time, but users came in far greater numbers. The N900, the not-quite-ready-for-mass-market, step 4 of 5 device, brought a tidal wave. The influx of people the Harmattan device brings should dwarf everything that's come before. Why would Nokia try to work against that? Why would they want to?

Even if Nokia, Intel, etc. wanted to lock out users in order to build a "pure", developer-only community around MeeGo, they'd be hard pressed to do so. maemo.org started as a developer-focused place, but InternetTabletTalk, a more user-focused site, grew right along side it. And even before maemo.org officially expanded it's focus, there was great overlap between the membership of the two sites, and quite a few non-developers ranked among the top contributors at maemo.org.

This community is bigger than Nokia, Intel, or any of the other corporations. Sure, they ship the cool toys and kindly pay the server bills, but if they tried to change the community in the way you fear, I assure you the community would find new, independent servers to host us.

There's not much definition of community on the Meego site yet, as that's been left to us, the community. We don't need Moblin, Intel, Nokia, or any other corporate group to tell us who we are. We've a greeter program, well then, let's greet the Moblin folks. Let's find out who they are. Let's tell them who we are. Then we can fill in all that blank community space on MeeGo.com with information about, and for, all of us.

MeeGo Greeters assemble!

Point me to where I can shake hands with the moblin people and I will. But as the maemo-community people will testify, I'm not very familiar with how mailing list communications work.

I'd like to suggest that one of the things we could use this as an opportunity to do is redesign our talk forums from the ground up so we have a structure that will (i) make users of legacy devices feel at home and able to find their way without drowing in the newest and shiniest, (ii) help new users make a beginning, seek help and support (provided by willing volunteers), (iii) channel more experienced users into providing support, wiki-editing, testing and feedback (and maybe even developing) and (iv) move all the 'non-specific' stuff into one area where people can throw mushy peas at each other to their hearts content in 'sucks/rocks' threads without disturbing the general running of the place.

Reporting for duty, SAH!

Your first task: tackle the RPM debacle on meego-dev.

Good luck!