Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

http://www.raiden.net/articles/inter...unity_council/

Just a little more info from my point of view (FWIW).

I like all of these proposed changes. Let's make them.

Tim

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

This sounds like it could contain the solution I am looking for, but only if that integration is a two way street.

For example: If when the mailing lists are used they in real time are posted to the forums. And if then the community could go to the forums and provide input, that would be then sent into the mailing lists.

This would let people continue to use their preferred form on communication, while still allowing more people to follow and provide input. This seems like the of both worlds, but this also seems like a lot of extra work over just using the forums for all Council communication.

However, if this is not possible, I would support dropping mailing lists as formal line of communication from the council, and move all council discussions to talk.maemo.org.

As for IRC this is dynamic real time way to communicate that cannot be replaced. I do propose a place on talk.maemo.org similar to this http://tablethacker.com/wp/?page_id=30&lang=en-us Giving user on the site an ability to see whats happening on the IRC without loading a client. Additionally greater visibility to scheduled IRC meeting.

I honestly believe the best way to keep this community together and continue to grow into a place where the community is setting the direction on policy is to give complete transparency with all council communications.

This allows the greater community to better judge what council members are doing. Being able to know what people are doing and how they see and talk about maemo is key to allowing the community to factually judge the council members job, compared to what they would like to see.

See as Quim points out, we are less concerned about your what your doing, like updating wiki's, and more concerned with the decisions and preferences regarding the greater community.

I understand that saying there is no transparency in council, is mostly not true. There some private communication, but for the most part things are done publicly. However some things are unclear and its hard to get a big picture when people need to follow several forms of communication to keep up with the same thing "maemo".

I appreciate the open lines of communication

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

As an aside, forums are generally frowned upon by developers/power users, who prefer email (or IRC for immediate discussion). One reason for this, imho, is that with email you can reply to a specific email and your archive/email software should know which one you were replying to and split the thread and display it as a load of branches depending on what you replied to. This is unlike the forum in which lots of sub-conversations go on all at once and it gets pretty painful once the thread grows to any significant size.

Now everyone's different, and you obviously prefer the forum style, but I don't think you will be able to persuade people that it is the best format. Integration is certainly a good thing if you prefer the interface though.

Just my 2p's worth.

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

Well I do not want to stop anyone from using a form of communication. However I see no reason why all council communication (related to council work) not work these council members do as a community member, can't be in ONE form of communication?

It's not that I prefer the forum style, it's that this is the biggest audience and therefor the best way to communicate with the community?

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

I think you are giving too much important to the council.

What decisions and preferences are these? What has the council decided? What preferences has the council expressed?

It's not the council who brought ITt to tmo or reorganized the forum.
It's not the council who decided to co-organize a hackfest with Mozilla.
It's not the council who decides where the next Maemo Summit will take place.
It's not the council who pushed Mer al Fremantle community edition.
It's not the council who decides the QA process for the extras repository.
It's not the council who decides whether School comes back or not, on wiki or video.
It's not the council who closed down the ITt wiki after moving the relevant bits to wiki.maemo.org.
It's not the council who decides whether the Brainstorm will be based on Midgard or Drupal.
It's not the council who decides that maemo.org has an orange-grey layout.
It's not the council who decides that the N810 ITt theme gets deprecated

(long etc)

Name more things that concern you and I bet you an Amsterdamer dinner that the council didn't decide that. Nor had a preference as council (their members individually sure, but not the team as a whole).

Yet they are aware and active in all these importants topics, triying to make sure the right things get done and pinging to Nokia when there is something that deserve special attention and dialog (e.g. Mer and the acceleration drivers).

All those tasks, discussions and decisions take place in the context of those projects, and the best the council can do is to summarize this activity in blog posts, push where needed, mediate where needed and ask for wider feedback when needed (feedback not for them personally, but for the projects working on something needing wider community attention).

Do you expect to find #maemo full of council discussions? Doesn't happen. Neither at maemo-community or (in normal circumstances) here in the Talk forum. And that's fine, the important stuff happens elsewhere on other topics. They are just meant to be facilitators, not the governors of the powers that be.

(Sorry for typing so much today - it's a boring raining Saturday in Helsinki... although now the sun is shining between the clouds).

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

About forum-list integration, yes the idea would be that some prefer mailing list, some forums but it doesn't matter since everybody share the same posts. No need to discuss this again (the previous time was only 3 days ago in another thread you started). :)

See the post from Reggie at Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

Quim there is no need to apologize, I enjoy the communication.

All I am trying to say, is that if I want to make an informed decision about what my council member is doing, it would be nice to have a single form of communication to follow (IRC excluded)

It is very clear to me, that council members preferences are heard louder within the maemo organization than standard users. As they should be, that is their roll. So if they are saying we need X, people are asking for Y. The community should have view and input into what they are representing, and if the community disagrees with what is done, they have recourse like voting.

Instead people end up making voting decisions based on non council related issues, and often feelings about people instead of facts on how they actually performed as a council member.

PS

It's rainy day here too :(

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

Some of this was brought up in this thread, but this is really a separate topic. That is why I opened this thread, since that one went off onto this topic. The actual topic there, if you read the first post, was where and how should issues related to the greater community be communicated. So for hot topics that affect the community as a whole, where and how can these topics be given greater visibility to the larger community.

Where this discussion is how should normal communication come to and from council

So its really two separate discussions.

I still am unclear if the email integration is two way, if it is then, I said have at it, but it seems like more work, but if you can accommodate everyone, it would be the best of both worlds.

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

See the reply I made to this point earlier. You lose people who don't use the forums when you move away from the mailing lists. Subscribing to a mailing list wont kill anybody.

I'm against a Java IRC client of a variety of reasons (one, in particular, is because your client has brought in a number of spammers I've had to kick from the channel on multiple occasions :)).

Openness and transparency has been our primary goal since the council's inception last year. This does not, however, mean that every single issue needs to be posted to a half-dozen different communications channels.

No, an absolute statement like that is completely untrue. :)

Re: What role does the Maemo Community Council's play?
 

I'm not so sure. Each council member, former and present, was an active, influential community member before joining the council (and even before it existed), and I can't say I've seen any measurable difference in status since being voted in.

I'd say they were voted in due to their status, rather than the other way around.