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

maemo.org discussions anywhere that all members don't access, sport. It doesn't matter if its IRC, MUT, BITNET or the parking lot outside a Dinner in New Jersey once a week.

Why do you feel the need to find error in the content of a post and then remark about it in your reply?

Is it a way to avoid the issue or do you truly feel that an issue has no merit if a t is not crossed or an i does not have a dot.

Concentrate on improvements to the original maemo.org sites and guess what... you will have more visitors, myself included. Ultimately we will have more members as a result.

Continue "fixing" this site and treating members who identify with the forum as less involved or not able to understand things of a "technical" nature and you will have less visitors, myself included.

Is that concise enough for you? Were all my t's crossed?

****
A good thread is a work of art and most active forum members know this. They take pride in what is presented and know how to present it. They check all their links and code and stand by ready to serve the viewer more information if needed by responding to any questions the viewer may have on the subject at hand.

Seems to me that these traits are something maemo.org needs more, and not less of.

The thing we all may be forgetting is that for every active member of a forum there are usually many others who just visit to learn.


BTW, this was the issue for all those playing along at home. :)

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

Please keep us informed of this progess ;)

What I was saying, is that like my site, it prompts you for the username you want to use. If the username was unavailable, freenode would let you know, telling you to change your nick. My screen starts you out with a Guest username. Integration would be nice, but I can see if ID's were not registered this would be a problem.

What I am saying is have a IRC page, like mine that will allow you to specify your name. However if you were not logged into maemo, you would not be able to see the page.

This would not allow any random person to login, they would at least need an active maemo.org account. Then you would just be providing a service.

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

All we are trying to do is help complete that transition. :D:D:D

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

In FACT I do not. But cmon, here is a link to the archives. YOU TELL ME???

Go here
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//maemo-community/

You will see a list of the months of mail archives. I scrolled back to the biggest archive. 1MB in October

Then Go here
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//ma...er/thread.html

I guarantee that MORE people visited ITT, and contributed to many more threads, in the months of October 2008, than took place in the community mailing lists.

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

What are you discussing, really?

Please tell what is your opiniom on this proposal made yesterday:

Council members, fans and discontents, does anybody disagree on this? Any ideas for improvement?

One day this maemo.org forum here and the maemo-community list there will be just the same. Different instances and interfaces of a same communication channel.

Anybody against this? If not please support Reggie in this work (e.g. not bothering him about anything else if you think such task is the most important in his plate).

Before this integration happens maemo.org forum and mailing list users are expected to be equally informed by the council about what is relevant and what requires actions. The council blog is the place for that. If there are active announcements they should be made both in the forum and the mailing list. People willing to start a discussion about a council related topic will do it from the place he likes better. It's the responsibility of the council to call for a wider debate if the topic deserves it.

This means that a forum user doesn't need to subscribe to a mailing list unless he wants to follow certain topics more closely. And this means that a mailing list user doesn't need to follow a forum unless he wants to watch certain topics more closely. There are also third ways useful for the time being: mailing list addicts can subscribe to threads to receive email notifications, forum addicts can go to http://n2.nabble.com/maemo-community...-f2589537.html and browse/post at will.

Does anybody disagree on this? Any ideas for improvement?

The whole chat debate is quite irrelevant, honestly. There is simply not a relevant amount of council related discussions there. Scheduled meetings are another story: they should be announced in advance, everybody should be able to join (via pure IRC or things like http://mibbit.com ) and the minutes and logs should be published.

Does anybody disagree on this? Any ideas for improvement?

Please don't get stuck in the little stones when all our hands are needed to move the big obstacles away.

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

I've already voiced my opinion that we should make the changes that are being discussed here. ;)

Tim

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

Well lots of things actually ;)

And it takes lots of discussion and reading to learn. I think this is a great thread. GA did an awesome job on laying out what his role is and how he sees it. You added your perspective which cleared up a little more.



GA's response did not indicate much was already going on this topic. Can you answer any of my questions above?

The chat debate isn't really only for council activities, it's just for access to #maemo or #maemo-meetings for logged in users. If the community does not want to support this, OK, but open communication is never a bad thing, and I think we really need to strive for over-communication. I would like to see perhaps a quarterly all hands meeting run by council in #maemo-meeting, where some BS feel good news topics can be discussed. Perhaps thats another thread ;)


Again, this has been a great thread,

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

I would like to call a (public) meeting of Council members (and anyone else) -- sorry, it will be at freenode.net/maemo-meeting -- so that we can discuss these topics and do some real-time wiki editing.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to do it until after this week, as I'm preparing for a couple of interviews, etc.

I'll try to get the call out (on the maemo-community mailing list) Monday, the 18th.

Tim

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

Not really. Reggie would be the one taking most of the work, I guess. Remember that until last Friday he was erm... reciving plenty of suggestions about tmo themes, so I don't think he has got a minute to think seriously about this forum-mail integration.

Sorry if I'm stubborned at thinking 'since when logging to an IRC channel has been a problem?'. It was easy 10 years ago with mIRC & such and couldn't be easier nowadays with mibbit and similar web projects.

The IRC chats are volatile by definition. Go there and catch or throw something. Otherwise you are free to follow the logs. fyi I'm not following #maemo at all (otherwise I wouldn't have time to do actual work) and I consider being well informed about what is going on.

Scheduled IRC meetings require previous announcement, minutes and logs, as said. No problem here.

It's a nice idea indeed. I recall we talked about monthly IRC meetings 'with Nokia representatives'. We had one but then a second never came. On the other hand we are discussing all the time here and in maemo-community, so I don't think we are missing much communication because of the lack of those IRC meetings.[/QUOTE]

And your embedded quotes... :)

> How will integration of "Council Blog" happen with the forums and mailing lists to be one form of communication?

My personal opinion is Proposal: Use Talk as framework for comments in Brainstorm, Downloads and News. Please comment there if you dis/like it.

>>* Council micro-updates can be followed at [new thread to be created in this forum] (watch)
> I think this should be a forum section, with multiple topics

Another personal opinion: I think a twit is a twit is a reply in an existing thread. If you need to create a new thread for each twit then it's not so much of a twit and we will see less of those since starting a new thread requires a bit more effort. For that you have already the threads opened with [Council] or the council blog/news posts.

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

So basically what I have been asking for HERE and HERE

Is underway now with the http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Comments2Talk and with http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_brainstorm

This will allow all forms of communication to be followed from talk.maemo.org, while continuing to allow people to use council blog and mailing lists. No matter where you post in all these areas will sync and all the same info will be available everywhere.
AWESOME
http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Comments2Talk

This is going to cover my request to create a mechanism to raise certain topic to a higher visibility within the community, and give people a way to vote yes or down on propositions. (will there be a tmo page for this also?)
AWESOME
http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Maemo_brainstorm

As for the IRC, it was only a suggestion, "penguinbait slaps qgil around a bit with a large trout" you said mirc ;)

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

Actually, this would especially be a great thing for new users (even moreso for people who have never used IRC before), because logging in could automatically send a "/msg identify" command to freenode.net. Likewise, the UI could contain other helpful message commands so that people wouldn't have to "know" them.

Tim

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

It would also be a great opportunity for someone to provide an instruction/Q & A thread for forum members who are not familiar with relay chat or the network maemo.org uses. :)

Because of a stacked work schedule this week I pro'ly will not be able to attend... However, if any new users do, this would be a plus.

Please expect to cover less with any proposed agenda and provide real use follow-up and in any forum threads that emerge because of this new user presence.
Participation in the proposed forum thread by veterans along with some patience might increase the productivity of sessions and decrease duplicate or specious forum threads in the future. The original thread could also be culled for a WiKi entry.



... then maybe the vision qgil shares with John Lennon would begin to take shape. :)

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

I've installed this add-on and now currently on beta. Anyone is encouraged to test it: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=28924

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

#m.occ hasn't been used much (I'm not a fan of Twitter for news feeds) and I like the idea of a "Council" forum with threads.

It should have a sticky, explaining this is a micro-blogging forum (experiment) and is intended that council members will use it to post short updates.

Although I think the reason #m.occ hasn't been used much is not one of technology - it's the point GeneralAntilles made earlier (in the second post in this thread): it's a facilitation role. The updates will be one of:

• Read & posted at tmo
• Followed some stuff on #mer
• Talked some budgets about summit
• Spent time chasing up people about committed sprint tasks
• Spent time writing up minutes/preparing agendas
• ...

See the council members' activity reports on the sprint pages for examples; sometimes there are committed tasks which are being commented on but the communication method for that is already being discussed on -community (oooh, look some meta-facilitation).

The big "problem" is it's not clear when a council member is acting on behalf of the council, and when they're acting as an involved community member. It's not a problem (IMHO) because there's no difference! As a council member, I'm continuing to do what I did before - only moreso. This is why there's no "briefing guide" or "member activity log": you're elected because of who you are and your participation within (parts of) the community, not on any specific platform (as Quim has pointed out, the day-to-day power of the council is negligible).

My view of the chair role is that takes a significant chunk of time to chair the sprint meeting, make the necessary secretarial changes in the wiki, put in the skeleton of the tasks and then chase people up for updates. This is a problem we've recognised, but I'm not sure that any solution (although excellent overall) won't just shift the distribution of work within the role. But that's fine - I signed up to be the secretary (it's just that "chair" sounded grander when I was drafting the original constitution almost exactly a year ago).

Although you are right that not everyone on the council has to be following everything - I think it's important if at least one or two members are. The facilitation role: communicating things which are going on in one corner of the Maemo community to the other corners is the single most important role (again, IMHO). This is what makes a "central council communication channel" such an odd idea - it's the exact opposite of what the council is for!

For example, taking the discussion on drivers from the wiki discussion page and repeatedly posting it in the right threads here. Pointing out duplicate bug reports and the right bug reports to rally around for a particular issue. And so on and so on.

Again, it's difficult to quantify - how much comes from being an active community member, and how much from a council member? You just do more of whatever it was you were doing before, with a slight administrative overhead of the sprint meetings (wherever possible). An increase of about 4h a week on average sounds about right. Say 16h a month, or 24h a month for chair.

I won't mention the rate at which my employer charges me out to clients (on an 8h man day). The 16 man days over a 6 month tour (excluding the work I do "for free" as a community member) would be a very nice lump sum (even after tax ;-))

Finally, some other randomness:

It says "maemo.org account". My reading of the rules (is the chair authoritative on this? Am I authoritative enough to say I am? ;-)) is that this would now include talk.maemo.org accounts. However, it is still dependent on users with such accounts having maemo.org accounts in order to calculate the karma? Although, one could(/should) argue that the karma for a tmo account could be simply calculated without having a maemo.org account (whatever the post count & thanks works out to be to get a score of 10)

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

As GeneralAntilles has pointed out, no-one is making such a proposal - nor is it technically feasible (the #maemo channel on Freenode exists because people are there - there's zero ownership and so no-one (apart from Freenode) could discontinue it).

However, is your question:

No, of course not; for two reasons:

1. I would hope that leadership would mean being influenced, but not tied to forum polls which have - over the last 3.5 years - been shown to be entirely useless for anything remotely meaningful on ITT :-)
2. the members of the existing IRC community have more say over their future than anyone else.

In exactly the same way as if the question were phrased "if there was a poll on maemo-community and tmo about whether to shut down tmo/make drastic changes; would the weight of the forum poll results and the email vote results be weighted equally," the answer is still no. For the same reasons.

Now, you could try arguing that the theme changes fell into exactly this category. Except the council did its role: once Reggie announced that he was moving his site under the maemo.org umbrella, the council kept all the different portions of the community aware of the discussions about the look & feel for the whole of maemo.org; where they were happening and how to contribute.

Not to try and turn this thread into yet-another-can-we-have-a-dark-theme-oh-look-we've-got-one-yay!-fest; but yes, there were issues with the go live which pissed off a vocal portion of this forum's membership. Yes, the council could have said:

But we didn't. So what? No-one else said it either until afterwards (exactly the same as with the voting in the elections, FWIW).

We're facilitators. We're not super-heroes (despite the costumes being designed!).

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

I meant one forum thread e.g. "Community Council Microblog" where only the council members would post (if all you are moderators I guess this is feasible). People having concerns or wiling to comment can start a new thread, quote the original post and go on.

An own subforum would be worth only if the activity of the Council was so intense that several threads would be going on at the same time, creating a lot of noise in the maemo.org forum. Just the same as it's been requested to the Alternatives.

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

Ah, that's even better then.

Indeed. And, as facilitators, I don't believe we should be making that much noise about what we are doing - just what everyone else is.

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

Update:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ay/002504.html

You can also add comments/suggestions here, but I'd rather they go to the list.

Thanks,
Tim

(Still working on a meeting time that works for everyone.)

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

Tim, this is AWESOME....

But I think it deserves its own thread and some visibility??

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

Ok. As soon as I can get everyone to agree to a date/time, I'll do that -- with plenty of time for comments too.

Tim

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

Sorry, for once is more handy to post just here: the agenda looks unrealistic. Either you cut points, add minutes or both. Cool stuff though.

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

Looks like a two-hour job to me.

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

Guys,

That's why I posted the first draft for suggestions. ;)

Tim

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

New time request:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldcloc...=30&sec=0&p1=0

As soon as this is agreed upon, I'll post the time and itinerary in a new thread here on tmo.

Thanks,
Tim

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

I will be there! Monday at 6:30 am. When's the sprint meeting?

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

I've not organised one yet, and Quim & I have had very little input on the proposed new process from the key stakeholders.

I'll try and find time to start organising it this week for sometime next week.

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

Hi there,

Coming late to this particular party, but you hit on something I have pretty strong opinions about:

There's the current situation, and the final desired situation. In the final desired situation, there's Nokia's desired situation and "the community"'s desired situation.

Nokia, through Quim, has expressed the desire that Nokia employees become just some more community members contributing to the Maemo software platform. The platform would be developed by the Maemo community.

Every now & again, Nokia will make some changes to the platform which they will not release straight away, which will be tied to a specific hardware platform. When the hardware is released, the software changes also get released, and in theory integrated into the community-managed software platform. Maemo becomes Just Another Upstream Project that Nokia are contributing to, albeit with a large number of the major developers and maintainers working for them.

This is the goal I'm aiming for right now, and what I want to see happen. It is a situation where community members and employees of other companies could take the Maemo platform and tailor it to their needs, become maintainers of core products, and generally ensure that there is Life Outside Nokia when it comes to Maemo.

The current situation is that this co-development doesn't have critical mass. Some parts of the infrastructure are handled in internal source control, there are not many developers outside Nokia making regular patches to modules that are public, and the platform is for the moment intimately tied to Nokia produced hardware.


How do we get to critical mass? Ensure that you can build a complete Maemo systemfrom publicly accessible source repositories, can participate in the life of the project without being a Nokia employee, that you have nardware other than Nokia tablets that can run the software and do useful stuff with it, and ensure that the processes for making & contributing changes are crystal clear.

There is one other important thing that needs to change, both in the minds of Nokia engineers and in the minds of the Maemo community - there is no "them" and "us". A Nokia engineer is a member of the Maemo community, just as much as you and I are. "The community" is not out there, it's in here.

Cheers,
Dave.

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

Thanks Dave. Well written.

(*qole shrugs and smiles at IRC log readers)

I agree with what Stskeeps says below.

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

http://wiki.maemo.org/2010_Agenda comes to mind of the direction things are going - Maemo (OS) is less flexible than Mer because of deadlines, corporate setting, etc, but Nokia also has the important components (Hildon, Maemo GTK, Maemo APIs..) - which without Mer couldn't exist.

The question of Mer is really - can a hardware vendor base on top of Mer, have a successful marketing advantage even when participating in a open project. That's why we understand that closed source hardware support and differentiation (apps, plugins, etc) exist - which we're happy about, as long as the generic platform is OSS and we can make mixed firmware images.

Would Mer be a place, in the future, where Nokia would primarily develop the open platform components that are generic across devices (Hildon, GTK, etc) within, and then when a proper stable releases, fork into Maemo vX.X when it's mixed with the differentiation and hardware support?

Who knows, but Mer is not there yet. Mer is about reconstructing Maemo - and it might actually help Nokia in moving towards more open development (they're already doing quite a lot of open development).

Nevertheless. There's no Mer without Maemo. My motivation for reconstructing Maemo was that I have difficulties in seeing the sustainability of the Maemo platform without this kind of reconstruction.

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

"Aurora Musis amica," and all that. Hope to see lots of others there.

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

Nokia has to put Maemo at full speed to be the most attractive platform for mobile computers. Attractive for users and developers, at least.

Quite often this means lots of innovation and polishing around open source components, and the whole community benefits from it. But quite often this also means compromises with transparency, open development and legacy support.

This is why Mer has an opportunity to complement Maemo, since their objectives are also complementary.

But none of this is directly related to the Council so please start a new thread if you want to discuss this further. :)