I'm with GA here. I really don't get all this talk of closing down this or that channel to keep only one's preferred medium. What happened to syndication ? That's what the Internet (not just the Web) is for, and I see it happen everywhere.

Granted, I'm not into IRC at all, I spend the bulk of my maemo community time on ItT out of habit, and do a mediocre job of keeping in touch with the rest of maemo.org and its multiple blogs, mailing lists & such. That doesn't mean others should be just like me, and those other channels should be shut down.

What if, for example, each time a new post is made on the maemo community council blog, a new topic was created (automatically, not manually when Quim or Tim or someone thinks to do it) in the relevant section on ItT, and said blog had comments disabled to the benefit of redirecting discussion about that post to said topic ?

It would be enough to alert me when something important is brewing that I'd have missed otherwise (like redesigning the forum theme :-),

It would make me more likely to participate,

It would concentrate more community input on a medium that's designed for discussions instead of a galaxy of so-so blog commenting systems, making it more easily searchable,

It would would draw more people living on other levels to the forum, and more people living in the forum to the rest of maemo.org, which I believe was the original goal.

Of course, for this to really work we'd really need to have SSO enable throughout the entire maemo.org space :-)