Re: Ask the Council!
 

Until last month I would agree (the future of Maemo looked very bleak to me, confined to the limitations of the smartphone form factor), but MeeGo changes things. Wouldn't it be great to see a device-neutral "marketplace" where you can get the apps (both commercial and community) you want for your MeeGo-running computer, tablet/MID, smartphone, car, TV and/or whatever else joins the party, all in one place? In such an environment I don't think the smartphone section would be the largest "consumer" of software.

I wish I had any good ones :-( The best I can come up with is for a a foundation-style entity to be formed and set up its own payment/donation system (possibly with some trusted third-party handling the card processing). I realise it'll probably never happen though.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Thanks. You're the best!

Does the current council have access to membership information, and track some of these numbers? I would really like to know how many members in total are eligible to vote? Not on an individual basis, just a total.

I'm sorry for seemingly just popping in to this active thread to ask these questions but after searching the forums, the title indicated that this would be the place to ask about current information.

After reading through the thread to see if the questions have been asked and answered already to avoid repetitiveness, I see the thread has forked into three or four sub-topics that you are doing a very good job of maintaining.

So... in the interest of continuity I will also comment on one of those sub-topics...

On your intuitive:

I have always thought that promoting monetary support for a developers efforts was a very good idea...

>> HERE, on 06-28-08 <<

Thanks for expanding on this Texrat.

It has since occurred to me that having all those funds pass through a central server if even for a fraction of a second, could produce additional revenue. While I don't think this is, or should be the purpose in the design of this initiative, I believe it certainly should be looked in to.

Perhaps whatever payment service that is chosen can provide maemo.org with a percentage of whatever "handling" revenue that is eventually generated. Even if this stream initially is just a trickle, it would grow as the popularity of the apps and the devices that use them grows.

I am not a finance guy and do not pretend to be one. I am making the suggestion here so that perhaps someone with real knowledge of such things financial can contribute to this conversation. I'm thinking it could help in supporting the development of your initiative and others like it in the future.

~

Back to my original query:

Knowing the make up and size of the group I am purporting to represent in the coming election is important to me. If this information is not available to the current council, how would you direct my queries?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

This isn't some magical property which being on the council will allow you to know. Just ask someone like X-Fade, dneary or Reggie.

Anyway, the electorate size can be roughly determined yourself:

1. Go to http://maemo.org/profile/list/
2. Find the page which has the first account at karma <10 (128).
3. Multiply the number of people per page (30) by the page number found in step 2, plus any left overs (14)
4. Tada: your magic number is 3,854 :-)

Of course, the Maemo community is larger than that electorate and larger than any one system's account database.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

D'oh! That's what I get for answering without thinking. :o

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Yeah sure ! How do I do that, I add my name to the list of contributor ?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

And the total number of registered members is available here: https://garage.maemo.org/
Currently: 33,775

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I'm a simple guy and I'm sorry I asked such a simple question. :o
I didn't think that it had magical properties. The answer does have meaningful properties to me though if I expect to be effective as a representative of the whole community.

I would also think that membership and other key volume indicators might be something the council would want to know and keep track of in order to predict what resources it should allocate and to prioritize its efforts to best be able to represent the community to Nokia.

Would you or VDVsx also happen to have the number of active community mailing list participants? I only recently joined the "Community" list via Nabble and I believe it stated on the sign-up page that the community list had a little less than 300 members if you also added those who received it in digest form. I don't know how to easily determine if this correct or if a total accurately reports unique members.

Mama always said, "simple is as simple does" so you might want to check my math on that.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Sounds about right. https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/roster/maemo-community (requires authentication via https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/list...aemo-community) currently states:

BTW, the numbers for maemo-users are 973/245 and for maemo-developers 1488/392. Make of that what you will.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I had a look at Fedora and I found something interesting called ABRT (automatic bug reporting tool).

May I ask why the protest to help users to report bug ? It seems to me to be a win-win situation.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

ABRT was mentioned on the email list, but thanks for the reminder-- I forgot to reference it in my presentation.

My understanding of protests was that some want to avoid involving users with crash reports, and make them 100% automatic or not at all. I disagree strongly with that idea.

Oh-- did you find RevdKathy's walk-through in this thread for using the MeeGo wiki? I had some blips while following it but ultimately it worked.