There's no such thing as a "Maemo community". How would you define a "Maemo community"? Am I part of the Maemo community? What if I'm active here, am interested in the further development of Maemo, own 2 tablets but explicitely say "I don't want to be part of a community because I believe in anarchy"? (I don't say this, it's just the first example I made up.)

You need to have some means of defining a membership... not only because of the elections, but to define a community per se. Not defining it might be enough for wannabe journalists who talk about "the linux community", but everything serious needs clear definitions.

So if there's no such thing as a "Maemo community", what do we have?
People who care enough to actively participate and communicate and contribute... using some web service.

So we could say we have:

• the community at maemo.org,
• the community at itt,
• the community at http://n800.de/ (an english speaking service will never even be close to representing "the community" in the broader sense that some think of; never forget foreign language resources)
• the community at http://tabletblog.com/
• etc. etc.

These we can identify. You can tell who's part of which community and who isn't.


Only thing you have to do now is decide:

Does the council represent a developer community? Then it's a council for the community at maemo.org .... While not necessarily each developer needs to be registered there, it's reasonable to believe that those who wish to be represented by the council and want to vote will sign up just for this one reason.

Or does the council represent a wider community, including curious users and people who are just helpful? Then itd be nice to include as many of the communities listed above as possible, forming a superset.

(You could, of course, go the other way round: Say that by definition maemo.org is the Maemo community because of its name and who wants to be part of it needs to sign up. That's a very logical approach, too. Just like in real life I can't be part of an association I never even contacted. Still, it leads to the same result: There is no "Maemo community" somewhere in virtual space, there's only maemo.org, itt, n800.de, ....)