There seem to be two separate major requirements:

1) Those of us still using N900 phones want somewhere to discuss them, get software for them, put software we develop for them, etc. This is a declining but still sizeable user community.

In my view, we should be encouraging Nokia to keep funding Maemo.org to do that but if/when they decide to stop we should be planning on how to continue. Exactly how that happens will depend on when Nokia pull the plug and how large the community is at that time. My guess is that the main things to worry about at that time will be the forums and the repositories, and the CSSU. Things like the autobuilder, the promotion process and garage could all be dropped, along with karma, planet and several other things. It could probably become small enough that no funding is needed -- one or two community members would probably be willing to fund the limited infrastructure needed (like many other small hobbyist communities work).

2) Does Maemo have a future on other devices, either alone or merged with other projects (MeeGo, Cordia, whatever)? Personally, I think the answer is no. When my N900 dies I plan to revert to what I had before the N900: a small and fairly dumb phone and a fairly small (pocketable) tablet which tethers via the phone.

My view is that no one is going to make a great phone and open up its software: the phone market is just far too cut-throat, with massive development costs and risks and further consolidation so there will only be three or four companies left with the ability to make a great phone.

But I think the tablet market will be much more open, with many more manufacturers, offering devices in different form factors and targetted at different markets. I think some of those will offer good, inexpensive, pocketable tablets and will be looking for cheap software for them. That will allow much more open and hackable software. What will that be? It probably won't be Maemo. It might be MeeGo (that seems to be where Intel are taking MeeGo). Or it might be something else. I plan to join whichever community meets my needs best at the time.

Of course, my personal views don't stop anyone from trying to make Maemo into that future OS, or even stop anyone from believing that there can be a future open phone OS. But I won't be offering any support for that. I am looking only to my first point: how do we continue to support the shrinking N900/N810/770 user community. I would like council candidates to be clear about which of these problems they are planning to address.