And now about the couple of topics that seem to be more controversial: Council and ITt merge. It's also unsurprising that they create friction now in the early stages since they belong to something humans use to fight about: power and territory. Or better said: different opinions about power and territory.

About the Council, I personally think that most people is giving too much importance to it. I really wonder why. It seems almost a paradox that the ones less happy about the Council seem to be the ones "giving" more powers to it. However, most topics can be discussed, agreed, and executed without needing any Council at all. Just like before the Council existed.

It may also be that a % of blame Nokia became before is now redirected to them. But still I wonder what is it there to blame. What is the Council doing that is so upsetting? Actually... what is the Council TEAM doing?

It looks like there is a confusion between "the Council" (a team of elected members) and "Council members" (5 individuals that were active in the community and keep being active now). Question to yourself: has your opinion changed lately about Jaffa, GeneralAntilles, timsamoff, Kees or qole? Let me guess most answers from those top posters: no. The fact that these people are now council members have accentuated your previous opinion (good->better, bad->worse), but the existance of the Council itself is not the root of the (quite personal actually?) problems. Those problems, quite normal in any place where humans spend a lot of time together, actually originated in those times of happy community help and collaboration - but they were mostly covered because there was fresh food to fight hunger and plenty of multidirectional discussion to avoid tiredness among the usual suspects.

About the ITt merge, it's all about territory IMO. It's understandable that frictions appear and they usually get sorted out over time. What I don't understand is this feeling of "loosing power" with the merge. What is exactly the power that an ITt member could exercise before (under the highly appreciated and never contested benevolent dictator Reggie) and now (with the same Reggie for Talk + an alignement with the now community driven maemo-org, an alignement Reggie agrees with and helps consolidating)?

I would say that the average ITt contributor had the power to collaborate and argue against the powers that be. And now can do exactly the same, and even have an influence to the Council that will push some points of the agenda to Nokia in a way that no long hot ITt thread could do before. And Talk can still have long hot threads blaming Nokia and whoever you prefer.

All in all I think the whole problem is highly emotional and this is why my personal way to deal with it is to fight not you or you but hunger (in the little measure I can) and tiredness (posting less and thanking more what others say, specially those with good ideas and far from the top posts rankings).