Thread: Open letter to the Maemo community
View Single Post
dneary is offline dneary
2009-05-27 , 09:54
Posts: 263 | Thanked: 679 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Lyon, France
#90
Originally Posted by YoDude View Post
What hasn’t been posted was the # of registered users of itT vs. maemo.org. Many members of iTT were not registered members of maemo.org at the time and were not eligible to vote.
Many times more than just 700 I believe…
I can give you the figures for the number of maemo.org accounts at the time of the last election (15,000 approximately). Most of those did not meet the "created more than 3 months before the election, and more than 25 karma" requirement.

Originally Posted by YoDude View Post
What steamed the clams of most I believe was that many were not aware of elections or any changes to the forum until a thread asking the question “Why didn’t you vote?” was posted. The ensuing turmoil eventually died down but new threads started popping up suggesting we move this and change that.
Again, most registered forum members didn’t get involved. They may have believed that the forum was still administered by Reggie under the terms they agreed to when they first joined the forum. Others may have never imagined a forum run as an ad hoc democracy and didn’t pay these “Hey kids! Why don’t we try this.” threads much mind. And others still may have just come to the forums only to promote or learn about the latest Tablet ideas and applications.

...

Now imagine that for a moment... It was very possible that a member of a maemo.org who had never posted a word on itT would know more about the changes about to take place on itT than a contributing member of itT who has come to the forum almost daily for the past 3 years.
I see your point. I first heard about the idea of bringing ITT under the maemo.org unbrella around the time of the Maemo Summit last September, where I first met Reggie and Roger. Both were very enthusiastic about the idea, and started talking about it in the forum soon afterwards to gauge reaction. I wasn't aware of any particularly heavy backlash at that stage.

I will defend the karma metrics by saying that forum posts are easier than wiki posts, they are (often) more throw-away comments than something that you hope will be persistent and helpful over a longer period of time to more people. You have a point - someone can copy & paste something from Talk into the wiki & get more karma. This is not a gaming of the system that we've seen yet, but I think it might even be a positive development - I for one want the wiki to be a very useful and valuable resource, and the more people there are adding useful content there, and helping edit and update existing content, the better.

Anyway - thanks for the clarification. I can see how heckles might have been raised, and I appreciate that when people get hot under the collar it can be difficult to be objective in your analysis (I'm as guilty of this as anyone). I hope all involved can appreciate that there is no malicious intent here, and that we're all aiming for the same goals and share similar values of community and helping others out.

Cheers,
Dave.
 

The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to dneary For This Useful Post: