The running of "Maemo" (the platform, the maemo.org website, Maemo Software team in Nokia?) is not something the council does. The primary role of the council (and I'll be raising this in qole's thread on maemo-community when I get a chance) is to represent the views and opinions of the Maemo Community (which includes anyone sufficiently enfranchised to discuss things on ITT, rank downloads on maemo.org, developers, power users, bloggers etc.) to Nokia, and vice versa.

On a practical level, this includes highlighting things like "x, y and z would be possible if Nokia did a & b, and here's why that's useful to Nokia and the community"; as well as recruiting for roles like the debmaster to aid in the quality and quantity of software in the maemo.org Extras repository.

It;s in the community's interest to get that repo enabled on devices wherever possible (and it's shipping with devices, but disabled at the moment), as this ensures that application authors are getting the widest possible audience.

You don't need to be a developer to either contribute to, or gain value from, maemo.org. For example:

• Helping triage bugs, or voting and commenting on them.
• Organise and contribute to the wiki, or use much of the useful information on there.
• Finding new applications to download and commenting and ranking on them.
• Keeping track of what's going on in the community through news and, more specifically, the planet blog aggregation.

Doing any of these things will also raise you karma points which, ultimately, will help contribute to things like any future device programmes - or sponsored travel. Concrete advantages to actively participating a lot in the community, but there are benefits to you (particular bugs or enhancements being fixed and new applications to use on your tablet) even if you aren't that prolific.

Ta muchly :-)