Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

There are several sets of questions for debate floating around challenging the candidates on important topics. Jaffa wrote his list to email, EIPI is setting up a blog using his questions and a hand picked few others.

My question was left on EIPI's cutting room floor. So, I believe, were other people's. So here's the 'director's cut' - those questions that didn't make the mailing or the blog, little snippets still worth considering.

I suggest (politely) that people ask just one question at a time. I confess were I a candidate (and thank goodness I'm not!) I'd be a bit overwhelmed by a list of a dozen questions all at once. Even Jeremy Paxman only goes at one question at a time.

I also suggest that we try to steer away from the questions that are already either in the mailing (Jaffa's) or the blog (EIPI's).

I'll repost here the ones I'm aware of that have been 'lost'.

Candidates are, of course, under no obligation to answer them. But the more you engage, the greater your chances of getting elected, presumably.

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

One from VDVsx:

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

And another:

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

From Texrat (Posted altogether - please separate answers!)

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

My question:

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

I don't agree with this statement from Aslan the lion, sovereign of Narnia. :D

An example: If you have an exam in some weeks. You learn and you know everything perfect. Then you're sufficient, and you know that, too.
Aslan said that to teach Caspian and the other kids the right attitude.
They had to learn humility and to be unprejudiced.
That is totally transferable to our situation with the council.
I've read somewhere, that the council is "leading" the community, and that the council member are the "leaders" therefore we had to specify our leading style.
That's plain ********!
We are not leaders.
We are servants for the community.
We have to put the interests of the community above our own interests.
Accordingly to that I really don't understand Texrat's first question:
We don't gain something (except experience, fun and maybe new friends)!
We have to give. Our time, our force and our best ideas to improve the community.

We facilitate it for Nokia to hear the community. Why?
Imagine you are in a football stadium. Everyone is looking at you. Now you ask: "What do you want to improve in this world?" Everyone begins to give an answer. Can you say afterwards, what the people in the stadium want to improve? No!
But if every block in the stadium have had a representative, a servant who collects the wishes from the people and communicate them to you, then you would know exactly, what the people want.
Our community are the people in the stadium, the council are the representatives and the one person standing in the middle is Nokia.

Because of that it is VERY IMPORTANT to vote on the upcoming election for the one, who represent your interests!
Nokia is hearing, but only if you speak to them!

We are maemo!

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

@RevdKathy, thanks for you effort of putting this all together.

What new initiatives do you want to develop inside the community ?

I believe that quite soon we will have many new initiative coming from the community itself, it will be a matter of giving attention and support to them.
Something I would really like to see happen is support for unified donations system within maemo.org (I have written a bit about this in reply to EIPI's question). This, in my opinion, will be important for two reasons: not only as an encouragement for developers but also as a strong voice of community saying, that Maemo and MeeGo can be commercial platforms. Something similar happened with AngryBirds Levelpack 1, when a strong voice 'we want to pay, let us do that' was heard.
I would also like to encourage regular users to be more active in extras-testing process. Making voting and commenting easier (directly from the phone?) and more visible should speed the process of bringing excellent applications to the end-user. That is where I would see my focus.

What do you hope to gain personally from your time on the council?

Beautiful women and fame of course. What, women are not really attracted to Maemo Community Council members? Jezzz...
Seriously though, I see this is a way to develop, to see how such body as Council works and how it interacts with Community. Yes, there is much more to give than to take in this. Still without personal development, we won't be able to help the Community to grow better. It is a win-win situation :)



What experience or aptitude of yours do you hope rubs off on other council members?

I hope to bring the perspective of small developer & power user.
More importantly however, I will try to be the voice of reason and understanding in the council (ok, it sounds lame, but it will be need; it is apparent even now). Council should represent users' views, not be autocratic rulers. This is part of my philosophical (or religious if you wish) experience, which I can contribute. Extremes are easy, it's finding the reasonable middle that is difficult and must be exercised. Taking step back to get the right perspective, this is something many community members (even those with top Karma).
On a more practical note, I have been forum moderator (matematyka.pl, largest Polish forum about math) for over a year, dealing (with success) with community. At the moment I'm studying Nokia devices as part of my Masters program, developing some smaller and larger things along the way. Being a student, I'm used to project-oriented work (we need deadlines, goals, teams, etc.), stress, long nights and so on. I guess you can never have to much of this in a body such as this Council.

Where do you see MeeGo 1 year from now? be as imaginative as you dare.

One year from now? I see iPhone running MeeGo and Steve declaring (with tears behind his glasses) that he has never seen better OS. Imaginative enough?
In a year we can expect two devices running MeeGo (not counting n900), probably one from Nokia and the other one from other vendor (not necessarily a mobile phone/tablet). This will mean that the community will move from One Device-One OS-One Vendor to just One OS. It will be more interesting (especially if the other device will be something different), which will probably split members into general OS interested (more devs) and Device interested (regular users). Interesting times those shall be.
The platform itself? It will be pushed as alternative Andorid by Nokia, with goal to replace Symbian on high-end devices from Nokia. If everything works as planned, both devs and users will get unified platform and user interfaces for wide range of devices. Which is a nice thing.



Aslan said to Caspian "If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not".

In what ways do you feel Council membership will stretch you beyond your current personal capabilities, and how do you intend to respond to that stretching?

Buddha said: He is able who thinks he is able.
This questions corresponds to the one about personal gain from membership. This is going to be a serious commitment. The difference from my current and past commitments is that it is not something I do to get benefits from (money, better education) but to give, personal benefits being just something extra. This is an important lesson to learn (paradox, eh? the important benefit is that there are no benefits), giving to community without expectation about money or fame.
This what I would like to say to myself in a 6 months, 'I was doing something not because I was getting something for that, but because it was important for others'.

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

Perhaps advertising this thread a little would be useful ;-)

I'll try and answer the questions later.

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

Nothing in particular that I haven't already been working on. Mostly I'm waiting on the Bugzilla 3.4 upgrade to really get to work improving the process there, and helping to push the bugsquad farther, but I'll also be continuing to work to push efforts on the wiki.

The council is there to help provide a push in the right direction if required and speak up if anything goes completely off the tracks. It also serves to help push the community agenda to the paid staff. The maemo.org staff are largely autonomous, however, and their effort tends to be invested wherever they thing it will help most and it's worked well for us so far.

Niels was recently selected as the team leader, so his ever-wise hand should help give more focus to the efforts.

I think the current means are fine, but they are used too infrequently and without enough consistency. More focus needs to be put on communication during the sprint period, as communication is a large part of what makes an agile process work (or not).

Council work is something I've always enjoyed. As I've said before, I like helping to make good things happen and the council is one of the best places to do that from. Watching those good things take off is an extremely rewarding experience.

My winning personality? ;)

As a community-oriented person, facilitation has always been an area I'm effective in and enjoy. It's a relatively easy gap to fill, as it's simply a matter of knowing as many people as you can in as many areas as you can and connecting them together when they need to be connected. This being one of the core roles of the community, I hope I can help other council members excel in this area (meta-facilitation? ;)).

Candidly, probably not all that far. Nokia's lost a lot of ground to other platforms since 2005 (especially Android) and given up a big opportunity to be on top early thanks to hesitation and endless hedging from the dinosaurs in charge (Anssi "Don't pirate music" Vanjoki's talk at Nokia World last year is completely revealing).

I see a handset from Nokia, perhaps one or two from other manufacturers like LG that are branded as MeeGo, but bear little resemblance to it from the user perspective, perhaps a couple of netbook manufacturers half-heartedly pushing models shipping MeeGo by default and maybe some Chinese MIDs thrown in for good measure.

I'm optimistic about where it's headed, but worried about Nokia's continued inability to get behind the platform that's going to save them as a company in the long term. So, as with everything, I guess we'll see.

Diplomacy and tact have never been my strongest areas, and being on the council is a position where you have to keep your composure at all times, as your words and actions reflect on both the community and (to a certain extent, at least in perception) on Nokia.

This is one of the reasons I like council work, though. It forces you to be a better community member.

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

I hope people don't think they can't suggest an idea for an initiative without being on the council! Maemo becoming MeeGo will have an impact on our community which is currently unclear, so it's probably not the time to introduce sweeping new initiatives.

Having said that, I want to allow the monetisation of maemo.org downloads, so we don't have to force community developers to Ovi if they want an easy, and obvious, way of earning a few extra quid. I think Randall's community outreach programme - and the corresponding collateral for use at community events (such as onedotzero) - is an excellent idea which needs further fostering.

This is on top of the "ongoing" activities such as supporting Google Summer of Code, a summit later in the year and so on.

I think there's a desire for transparency from all, and an obvious desire from the paid contributors to concentrate on delivering requirements, rather than page-long weekly reports. The current Qaiku workstream isn't very public, or easy to follow, however the sprint task summary pages are getting better at being maintained, and provides an at-a-glance summary of the current work.

I would rather see effort expanded on key community communications about changes which affect users and developers rather than a requirement for regular reports. For example, the move to drop.maemo.org for uploading to Extras; the move to vcs.maemo.org for version control and the changes to the karma scoring were all very poorly communicated by their task owners. Developers were left scrabbling around deep into mailing list threads for answers, and consensus-driven karma changes were tweaked "because it could be an improvement".

This increase in accountability could, I think, be achieved by the maemo.org paid contributors better setting and running their own priorities. Instead of the council chairing the sprint meeting, it should be done by themselves in public; chaired by X-Fade. This could continue to be done via IRC, or be mailing list or locked forum (whatever works for them). The group have two customers: Nokia and the community; and these two customers should feed in requirements (the first via Quim Gil & Tero Kojo; the second from the council). These would be put into the pot with the internal-driven work. I believe this would result in a clearer set of tasks and a more managable sprint process.

Having been involved in the creation of the council, and been a member twice, I hope to "scratch the itches" which have developed over the last six months. It's been great to watch another group of people make the role their own, but stepping back has given me a clearer vision as to how community facilitation could be improved.

I also hope to shape the formation of the MeeGo community and its interaction with the commercial MeeGo stakeholders; the chance to set that on the right path will mean we could get a great sense of satisfaction looking back in 5 years at a successful ecosystem which we shaped.

Being a professional software developer/consultant/architect means I'm used to listening to end-users with a limited technical understanding (as their focus is, quite rightly, on their roles). I think this gives me experience and professionalism which could serve as an example to others.

It'll be shipping, as a default OS, on one core mobile phone device (e.g. the N900 successor); and a number of manufacturers using it as an open source base (e.g. LG). I don't think we'll see any netbooks shipping with it as standard, although a larger tablet device may ship with it, depending on how the iPad is received on launch.

I think MeeGo will, a year from now, be facing many of the problems Android has faced in the last year or so: multiple manufacturers not really coordinating very well (beyond a core set of manufacturers), with many shipping custom "value-add" user interfaces. (Value-add applications is fine, but changing the fundamental UI interactions of the platform is a recipe for disaster with no third party application really able to blend in). This fragmentation is causing real pain for Android users and developers, but will be overcome. If MeeGo goes through the same pain, it may not be able to catch Android up.

Eek, this sounds like a job interview! Going back into a mode of trying not to get my heckles raised by trolls and always trying to present a professional demeanour. I don't think it'll be too hard, as it's something I have to do on a daily basis anyway, but will have to keep up in my spare time.

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

Sorry I'm late Kathy... I have a limited time on the forums sometimes and when that that happens it is easy to miss threads. Since if I am elected, I would be new to the council and my decision to run was made late based on the shortage of candidates; the time I have had lately has been spent researching the responsibilities of the council, answering questions, doing some more research, and then answering newer questions. I apologize again and want to assure you it was not a slight, any questions are important to me and I will do my best to answer them.

In fairness to the other candidates who may already have answered these questions, I'm going to cut and paste each question I do see in your thread into an off line text editor and not return to this thread until I have answered them all to the best of my ability.

Ta...

Re: Questions for election candidates: the director's cut
 

My replies are as follows:



Originally Posted by VDVsx

Community

What new initiatives do you want to develop inside the community ?


Being new to the Council I think I would first become familiar with what is already on the table and prioritize based on that.

One initiative that I am aware of is listed on the Council WiKi as:

I would start by seeing what I could do to help make that happen more fully.



Originally Posted by VDVsx

How do you see the relationship between the council and the payed staff at maemo.org ? In your opinion the current means and periodicity of reporting are enough or the maemo.org staff should use other means to report to the community ?


As I have stated in other posts, having been new to this process I have only recently joined the mailing list. The only information I have found about maemo.org staff is in the forums or the community WiKi's and other Web based maemo.org assets. Shooting from the hip (which I loathe to do) I would say that since the Council is the elected voice of the community, all communication should be through the Council. If the Council's frequency and distribution of those reports are found lacking by the community, then it is the Councils duty to respond and correct this. But again, not knowing what staff and what duties these staff have I am at somewhat of a disadvantage. Staff could conceivably be a communications director.

I am sure the who, what's, and where's are known by active mailing list participants and followers of any threads that have been posted on the forums in the past, but for a forum centric guy like myself, I wasn't able to find as much information as I would have like to before responding. That's why I am anxious to help with any existing initiatives like the one I referred to in my answer above.





Originally Posted by Texrat

1. What do you hope to gain personally from your time on the council?

I so want to answer Texrat with a humorous response usually found on the forums like... "Chicks. It's all about the chicks man"

However, since joining the mailing list I have come to know Randy as a serious guy at times and this is a serious question that deserves a serious answer.

Besides getting to know my fellow Council reps better, I hope to learn how an engaged user like myself can become more involved with the process.



Originally Posted by Texrat

2. What experience or aptitude of yours do you hope rubs off on other council members?

I have learned slowly over time how to weed through the noise and identify only the things that I actually have control over so that I can best spend my energies. Please don't get me wrong, I have fought many a good fight in my time. But when it is all said and done, if I had the time back that I waisted trying to change things that couldn't or shouldn't be changed, I would have gotten a lot more accomplished.




Originally Posted by Texrat

And the obligatory essay question:

3. Where do you see MeeGo 1 year from now? be as imaginative as you dare.

From the IRC logs that I have read, it looks to be coming along quite nicely. I imagine in a year from now most of us will be amazed at was has been produced. MeeGo I think will evolve through three or four phases and just as Maemo evolved, the progression is not necessarily linear; meaning one phase must end before the other begins. Rather, each of these phases is developing independently so that when this evolution occurs it is rapid and almost instantaneous. Like crystallization.

Once viability is established, the part that each evolutionary phase was responsible for will continue to grow and develop.

I'm thinkin' MeeGo will surprise most of us in where and what we will see it pop up on. The recent N900 push may be an indicator of that. I think we also got a glimpse of this a while ago with one of Kate Alhola's presentation that we discussed on talk pre Fremantle. I tried searching for it but kept coming back to a stylus vs. finger input debate.

In all of the above of course am referring to MeeGo the product and not MeeGo the community.

MeeGo the community I believe will evolve much like Maemo did as presented by a member of the first Maemo Community Council, Eduardo Lima (Etrunko) >> http://www.blip.tv/file/1918628
This also will happen much quicker because of the lessons learned here and will involve plenty of input from potential, then actual end users as well.




Originally Posted by RevdKathy

Aslan said to Caspian In what ways do you feel Council membership will stretch you beyond your current personal capabilities, and how do you intend to respond to that stretching?

I fear that if elected I will not be able to absorb the amount of new information that is presented to me. As Aslan alluded too in that speech, perhaps this fear is what will drive me to perform as I should.

Thank you for the opportunity to respond.