I voted that there should be a one stop shopping site for community information. Perhaps in the "Announcements" section of the forums. Looking there, the 2nd most recent thread had a last post date of Dec-14-08.

As much as some will hate to have any kind of discussion on the forums, I think it is the best place for it to reach the most people. Just checking there are over 22,000 people registered on the forums. Even if you figure only half are active, that's still a lot of people. Probably many more that on any mailing list or irc channel. Probably more than read any blogs or visit other pages.

I participate in other forums where the administrators can force you to view a particular thread before continuing into the forum. Could that be an option to highlight particular topics for the community?

Obviously, we aren't looking to be informed of everything going on. But *ANY* topics that can affect the community should be discussed in the forums *in detail*, not discussed elsewhere first, then brought to the forums once the groundwork has already been laid.

For instance, I would have loved to vote in the last council election, but it wasn't clear to me the multiple steps that needed to be taken to be eligible to vote. I believe that I would have had enough karma. I saw a thread on the upcoming elections, even found a maemo.org page with some nominations. I read that an email would be sent with further instructions for voting. I didn't read anywhere that I needed to 1) register with maemo.org (I thought "community" would include ITT), 2) create a link in my maemo.org profile to my ITT user profile web address (as opposed to my user name) 3) wait a day or two for my karma to be calculated.

I suppose I should have spent several hours googling on what I needed to do, and what the requirements were before I would be allowed to vote. Instead, I stupidly mis-read the information I did find, and assumed that voting for a "community" council would be easier and involve more of the community they purport to represent.

Of course a single thread detailing the required steps in the forum would have given far more people access to voting and likely resulted in far more than 160 votes. Just my 2 cents.