If someone doesn't *want* (!= can't, can't is when he isn't allowed due to law/residence/whatever) to become part of General Assembly, it isn't alienating her/him - it is self-"alienating", personal decision. Same situation with voting for Council - following your way of thinking, we have 90% of Community "alienated", cause, from those thousands of people, we get, like, 80 votes? BTW, I'm "alienating" myself, as I don't vote for Council for many, many terms (with the exception of voting *against* certain Councilor, who got elected nevertheless, and almost blew that place up), and I would be last to think that someone is "alienating" me.

As long as General Assembly is open to everyone *willing* to participate, I don't see problem, anyway.

I think that requirement for IRC meetings is broken by design, as it requires real-time presence (that, most of the time, is NOT required to do the actual work). CSSU suffers from the same flaw *shrug*.

I see it as front page+TMO thread+mailing list announcements what we need, what skills are needed for that thing, and what will stop working if we won't find anyone willing to participate in the work group. Otherwise, IMO, most people shrug it off, as we already have the elected people that should take care of "everything".

Well, anyway, we won't know until we try

/Estel

Ps.
Speaking about IRC - are there any plans for making the IRC moderator things more transparent and in-control of current organization? 3/4 of IRC moderators are inactive, one is sworn enemy of the current administration and known for notoriously abusing moderator powers, and I think no one knows who have grand-administrator privileges there. Time to contact freenode and reclaim #maemo channel? AFAIK freenode have ruleset for such situations, and de-hijacking should be trivial.