[WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Dear Community,

The time has come for Council elections.

Nominations for candidates will open on Oct 21, 2013. As has been observed previously, nomination periods have to be extended due to a lack of candidates coming forward hence the purpose of this post is to clarify what Council actually stands for and an appeal for candidates to throw their names into the hat.

Over the past ~12 months, the Community has gone through major changes with the most overwhelming being the transfer of ownership from the "safer" sanctuary of Nokia to the "riskier" sanctuary of the Community.

Our infrastructure is currently being hosted for 50 euro a year at IPHH with options for them to extend it annually. On the other hand, there are interesting projects on-going; namely Neo900 and Jolla's imminent device.

Issues that were present with the previous Hildon Foundation Board have been ironed out too with the presence of logical Directors.

The Council now has a merged rule-set for both the Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation Council. We no longer need to run two elections, and one election for a Council body that will officially have both the titles will be the norm now onwards.

The Council's main role is to ensure the lights remain switched on for all Community infrastructure as well as to help any efforts from the Community that might need co-ordination. The Council is the voice of the Community-at-large and has a vital "red button" which if pressed can call for elections of the Hildon Foundation Board if at anytime it suspects the Board of running contrary to the Community's interests. Re-read, this is an important point!

Hence, in effect the Council is a very important body that requires dedicated candidates. From the current Council, joerg_rw, qwazix and I have been involved heavily since the past ~12months with all the migration work hence we have decided not to stand again for the Council. In short, we all need a bit of rest, and need new members to step in.

Therefore, we humbly appeal to capable and willing members to be steadfast in declaring their candidature for the upcoming elections.

In conversations with a few members a common theme emerges of members unwilling to stand for elections mainly due to doubts in their abilities to be able to carry out Council work. Let us assure everyone that you don't need to do technical work nor do you need to dedicate a large amount of hours per week to Council work.

There is a dedicated techstaff that keeps the infrastructure running and maintained while there is a weekly Council meeting which would usually suffice for the whole week's work.

So to end, we repeat our appeal to all to seriously consider running for elections!

Interested candidates please post your introduction here in this thread!

Regards,
Q3 2013 Community Council

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

So many views and no candidate declarations yet? Common people please step forward!

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

hmm I believe a lot have happened - all good stuff, and is surpriced there are no showing interrest.

This is my formal acceptance and request for participating in the upcoming council election.
My Maemo account username is NielDK and IRL Niel Nielsen.
I have been an active member of this community for a good four years, and have been member of the council previously.
Possibly it was the hardest time, since it was the transition from leaving a community that was regulated and sponsored by Nokia, and we had to form a council and set initial regulations / election of a legal board of director.
I did not succeed very well during this period. There were a lot of internal disputes and fights between concil member / board members and directors.
However, we got things started, and the council that was elected for the next period did a very good job in sorting out the mess.
It is sad to see that none apparently wants to continue, but hopefully the next council will do even better.
Secondly, why I am not happy about my period, was due to a load of personal issues, which I can say now have come to a (good) end, and I am getting hold of my life, and gaining more time to again be active member.
I have contibuted within this community as an active member, helping other members with issues, solving problems that arose from Nokia stopping support for N9xx device.
Also, I have been developing applications, utilities and libraries, that all now reside on openrepos - another great initiative to solve the lack of support/updates from Nokia.
For the most, my work have been consisiting in developing improvements to kernel, but also tools and libraries that is useful for pentesting.
I hope that I will be considered, and do feel asured that the next council will step up, and further improve our community and support for our devices, to have a life beyond the expectations of Nokia.
Thanks


/Nieldk

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

I think people were waiting for nominations to be opened rather than post early and then remember to have to email the mailing list to actually nominate themselves.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Nomination period open since 21., according to thedead1440's post #1
/j

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

know this will formally be done in the first council meeting (friday evening, GMT?) of the new Council but maybe the members of the current council could give

• brief overview of what was done
• what seem to be the big points that may (as far as they can be anticipated) need attention in the coming year

couple of questions i'm wondering about (but i haven't come to TMO anymore except if i had an issue with N900, thus maybe i'm the only one in the dark about this :rolleyes:)

• Neo900 - is it something the Council is involved with as such or is it a personal interest of some of its current members?
• what happened to the Board of Directors? still in charge of organizing financing (& knows gawd what else...) or has that become a (de facto) responsibility for Council as well?

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Hm. ok well that goes that theory. Maybe they're ambivalent about the "the last 12 months were really hard and time consuming but you should definitely run as it wont take much of your time!" vibe. Shrug. Fine:

"Hi I'm jcharpak and I am running for a seat on the Maemo Council. I've been a proud owner of a 770 as well as an N800, and have purchased a 64GB N9 in the last year when it became available and reasonably priced in the U.S. I'm a programmer/analyst (that's just a fancy term for what used to be called a computer programmer) :) My area of expertise is database stuff, specially Oracle, sql and pl/sql, along with oracle Forms and oracle reports, none of which is available for Nokia Mids or smartphones (with the exception of sql in sqlite). I've dabbled in plenty of other languages (C, C++, java, python, ada!) but not really fluent in any of them. I appreciate the work being done at openrepos.net but wish we could add an N9 section to the maemo.org autobuilder instead. Still it's good to have something as I believe Nokia announced it is not allowing new applications to be submitted to the Nokia Store. I like romantic dinners and long walks on the beach...just kidding I hate long walks on the beach. It's either really sandy or really rocky not to mention the whole walking part. I'd much rather stay at home, reading all sorts of technical blogs and dreaming of one day building a "trek" style game written in python and qml. I'm a big proponent of open source, else why would I be here? Please consider voting for me on the Maemo Council."

(I'm jcharpak and I approved this message)

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

HiFo BoD got re-elected as I promised on last council elections. It got a associated council, as I promised during last council elections. MCC and HFC got unified, as I promised during last council elections. Currently HiFo BoD is performing fine, given the mess the former BoD left us to clean it up.
And no, council is not - and will not be - involved in managing the finances of maemo community. Council is here to decide what to finance and what not, BoD exists to execute and control those decisions.

cheers
jOERG

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

just did that ¦-)
who has / where is the red button to call for a re-election of the Council?
if it is such an important organ, isn't all the more important to be able to "pull the brakes"?

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

It's called "announcing re-elections of both entities (HiFo BoD and [HiFo] council)", both entities can call for it, and you find it in the bylaws of HiFo. The fact that - no matter which side initiates those re-elections - always both entities finish their current term, makes it pretty safe from being abused. All the power to the community and those who actually care to vote.

/j

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Joerg,

not every question or remark is a personal attach against you :eek:
chill-out :cool:
you did a tremendous job with the repositories and only for that you deserve recognition from the community (and any N900 user, for that matter)

why should i have to check whatever document?
wouldn't it have made sense for TheDead1440 to formulate it clearly right from the beginning?

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

why do you think I feel attacked or whatever. You asked what's the story about the red button, and instead of thedead1440 I answered and gave as good an explanation with refrences as I could. I did this instead of waiting for thedead to answer, since this particular sentence in OP been suggested by me. So it's me who should have formulated clearly from beginning - I hope I fixed that with my last post.

/j

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

No ambivalence here. We spent much time on the task as during the past 12 months Nokia left the building, all our infra was migrated twice and was left in semi-broken state, we had to sort purchase and shipping of servers, to drum up an infrastructure team, to negotiate unsettled business with increasingly sparse Nokia contacts, to overcome legal difficulties, resignations of councillors and directors and non-cooperation of the previous board.

All of the above has now settled, and the past weeks things are pretty quiet. This is good, and it's now time again for a fresh body to devote it's time to fun, productive things that weren't possible this past term mostly due to organizational and time problems.

As a first step I propose that the next council resurrects the highly successful maemo coding competition that we (and I admit I have a great part of responsibility for this) failed to host during 2013.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Why not let the current council remain in since nobody's really stepping forward. The transition from Nokia funded community to open community could not have been an easy one; it seems to be still going on to be honest.

Once the dust has truly settled, then bring back the competitions and the stability to hand off to a fresh council that doesn't have to backtrack and possibly lose traction.

Just a thought.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

A fair comment.
However, the fact non of the current council are stepping up for this term may indicate why this isn't best for the community.

If nobody steps up this will happen anyway as it will keep getting postponed without a minimum of 4 candidates.

Ideally council could do with a mix of new and old members to freshen things up but keep in touch with recent goings on.

Remember most of the current council members do a lot of other important stuff for the community, like CSSU contributions, sysops and admins etc and the last year or so has not been easy.

The Nokia transition is to be mainly handled by BoD and it's still on going as you say. However connections with Nokia are getting thin and I have not heard much activity recently.

So please I do urge motivated community members to help keep us going.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Do we have any data available regarding how many users are qualified to sit for this election, not counting people who have been alienated by problems of the past?

I'm very concerned

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Well here last years. As you can see due to broken infra there is a link to 2012 data.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Coun...ble_candidates

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

As I am not on the list I suppose I'm not eligible candidate.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

:) a karma of 344 should be enougj

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Why not? - from your TMO posts and thanks alone, you have a Karma of 344! Check it out in your maemo.org profile (not TMO).
You need to link both accounts before that counts though.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Just compiled updated list
http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Coun...ble_candidates

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Thanks, I was not aware of that really :)
So I might step forward then.

My introduction:

Hi, I am juiceme and I am running for Maemo Community Council.
I have been part of the community here for relatively short time, just 17 months. That is not a long time in a human life but surely enough to fit into a community centered around common intrests.

My spark into joining maemo.org came when I purchased a N9 device, my first linux-based mobile phone. Previously I had owned Symbian devices since early nineties but I never did any SWDEV on those as my intrests were on big iron. N9 was the first small embedded device that had the same tools I was used to working with so naturally I was delighted on the possibilities it offered.

I have degrees in EE & ME, and some university courses in Math before dropping out :)
My current occupation is SW development for Telecommunication Systems, and I have previously done RF design, HW design and Test System design in previous jobs. I have worked in this industry for about 2 decades.
My passion is Free Software, and I am known t be fairly vocal FS advocate on my workplace. I use exclusively Linux/Unix variants in my work and on my own time, and am known for pestering people to drop proprietary/legacy OS'es and switch to Linux :D

My SW skills include c, python, test automation and tool creation. I like kernel work and prefer to use console over any GUI's.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Please everybody, don't forget to post on the mailing list too! That's the official channel for nominations.

https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/list...aemo-community

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

I was surprised to see I'm eligable, thanks to sixwheeledbeast for the compiled list. Unfortunately I won't be able to put myself forward due to shift work and issues irl. I don't feel I would have the time to collaborate or meet the requirements of the role to a high standard at the moment.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

It might be interesting to see the karma list with last TMO login.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Good idea, but imagine a long-time offliner just visited once yesterday to uncheck receiving PM/mails. That would give a totally wrong image!
So there is the need to ' know ' your councilors...

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Just for the record: under certain preconditions I might be available for yet another term, to help out future council with some experience on how stuff gets handled. I however can NOT dedicate as much time to any such position as I did during the last 12 months. So even while anticipated workload is lower than it used to be in total for the council body, my availability still is depending on other candidates and their willingness to proactively take responsibilities and manage/track tasks without me doing constant supervising. Holler if you think I'm needed and those preconditions being met.

cheers
jOERG

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

HOLLERING!

Just to point out we would not be at this point with maemo.org without your help. So please take my/our deepest thanks.
I hope/know you will still support MO/TMO.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Depending on the individual POV this may as well be an argument to rather stay away from maemo in future ;-) Well, you said maemo.org, not maemo (at large) - so thanks for that. Maemo at large is at a very strange point right now I'd think. The extreme "noise" of almost exactly a year ago is completely gone, not even the usual bitching against council anymore, nobody interested in running for council, nobody even interested in elections. Rather I sense a general mood of "do we really need all that?"
I'm not sure if this is just because everything works too smoothly, because of me having established a somewhat "comfortable dictatorship" that nobody thinks is worth to start a rebellion against, or even because simply nobody interested in maemo anymore. :eek:

anyway, who are the candidates who been mentioned in the preconditions to holler and summon me?
/j

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

As qwazix already mentioned, candidates have to post on the mailing list too (the official channel for nominations) too. Please visit https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/list...aemo-community for further info.

From the announcement, here are the deadlines:
Nominations till the end of the day 2013/11/30 (GMT)
Contemplation till the end of the day 2013/12/07 (GMT)
Election till the end of the day 2013/12/15 (GMT)

So far, we have 3 candidates (2 of them pending announcment to mailing list!) and
need at least 1 more candidate.
A fourth candidate can be found here if some preconditions are met.

Good luck!

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

I wonder if my introduction mail on the list went awry for some reason? At least I cannot find it n the archives?

---------- edit ----------

I have now reposted my introductory piece on the mailing list, just in case.

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

+1

wisdom makes you think twice
EDIT found it
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/005915.html

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

i would like to run for council but well... i don't really say much, or do things that count towards karma so that is just a "little" short ( i have 4 karma... )

an introduction - i have been a member here on tmo for about 3 years, but you will mostly find me on irc
if i do not have anything useful to add you can almost guarantee i will say nothing

if i am elected ( karma issue aside ) i will stay quietly in the background keeping things running smoothly

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Okie... so we have 5 valid candidates for the upcoming election:
(in alphabetical order)

• chemist
• jcharpak
• joerg_rw
• juiceme
• nieldk

and one "invalid":

• chainsawbike (not enough karma)

So according to the election rules, the next council will consist of 3 members only.
.
Since council can use all the support and help it gets offered, a solution is for the new council to appoint chainsawbike to an assistant position without the rights of a regular councilor.

For the valid candidates, this is a nice set of councilors in spe, I think, but i also want to share my concerns which raised recently regarding chemist. First off, I wanna thank him for stepping up again and all he did and still does as TMO-admin, TMO-mod, counsilor and as HiFo board member. But these positions come with responsibility and some workload, which at times, can sum up to quite a pile. And while chemist had his vital part in discussions/meetings when (read: if) he was present and I'm sure he will do his best, when you look into the fridays' #maemo-meeting logs of the last 6 months, you'll find he was not present ~90% of the time which already led to quite some discomfort for the other councilors. Especially from council chair, you'd expect regular presence and an open ear to the community. Also, posting the final list of candidates (like above) actually is council chairs' job.

Again, while all efforts to support this community are highly appreciated, I don't think it's a good idea to accumulate so many positions in one person, as it pretty quick can simply become too much to handle.

Now its contemplation time, the election starts 2013/12/08 00:01 (GMT). Go vote then!

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

As a reminder to chansawbike and juiceme, you should set a good example by making sure your TMO and Maemo.org accounts are linked. (My bad, they already are...)

Also, all candidates should update their sections as appropriate on the wiki page for this election. (Thanks to sixwheeledbeast for setting up said wiki template.)

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

I should be well known by now...

but if not, I am serving you as current Council's Chairman, Talkmaster, Member of the HiFo BoD and should maintain CSSU Stable (yeah I know I need to get that sorted pretty soon).
I like the maemo idea and ever since I had my first computerPhone I am here - started with Brainstorming, bug-tracking and forum moderation.

I like to sail, offshore and online.

Chem|st

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

Voted.

Just as a reminder/bumper for the folks to do so too!

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

:) I've voted!

And you?

Please hurry and vote!

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

I hope to see more voters than the last election.!

Re: [WANTED!] Council Candidates & Introductions
 

also voted :)