I have been asked to interview Dr. Ari Jaaksi, Vice President of Nokia, in a "Maemo Devices/Maemo Community Face-off". I have been told that the "[f]ocus of the dialog should be on how the community interacts with Nokia and how Nokia sees the value of the community."

It seems to me that a dialog with a very highly-placed Nokia representative about community would be very weird if there was no community input into my side of the discussion.

I see this talk as having three or four sections.

1. Early days, the 770, Nokia goes OSS
2. N800, N810, development of Maemo
3. Summit '08 (Fremantle and new device specs) to Summit '09 (present)
4. Future

My rough outline will start in the days of the 770, when Nokia first jumped into Open Source, and then move through the years of the N800 and N810, with a final section on "what now?" which will focus on Fremantle and future plans.

I want to ask about Nokia's take on the Linux community when they first started exploring OSS, and how much friction there was internally as the Maemo department/unit came into existence. What kind of culture clashes did they see? What did they expect would happen when they released their one-of-a-kind product (not a phone, running Linux)? Did the community teach them anything in those early days?

I am also curious about the relationship of Nokia to its community through the last few years, as they dealt with the inherent cathedral-vs-bazaar tensions of Linux. I think they understood that Linux brings a developer community with it. But, did they expect the enthusiast community that grew around their tablets? (I think not; they had mailing lists for developers, but no forums for users.) Were there any surprises along the way?

Finally, I want to talk about the current generation of software and (hopefully, eventually) hardware, and the future of Maemo and the community. What is Maemo's current strategy regarding open source and community involvement? What kind of problems have they seen as they try to implement their strategy? What successes have they seen? As Nokia takes Maemo mainstream, now and in the future, how do they see the community changing, and how do they plan to adapt?

I'm particularly interested in how recent announcements are going to impact the community and Nokia's interaction with it. What will happen as Nokia teams up with Intel? What about the switch to QT across Symbian and Maemo platforms?

When formulating your questions, please don't phrase them like accusations or demands, and always find the community angle.

For instance, one of the big recent discussions on the forums has been about the lack of a D-Pad on the allegedly leaked N900 specs. If you want me to ask a question about this, don't write, "Why didn't you put a D-Pad on the new device?!" but instead, ask, "Comments from Nokia representatives in the forums suggest that, up until now, a focus group approach has been used to get feedback regarding new device designs. This has led to some heated discussions in the forums about missing features such as the directional pad. Do you see any change in the focus group approach now that Maemo Devices will be designing hardware? Will there be any more community involvement in these designs?"

I also expect that everyone will be eager to contribute questions about the recent changes in maemo.org, Fremantle, Harmattan, the N900, etc., but I am really hoping for some good community-contributed material for the other parts; I know we have members that have been around these forums since the beginning. Now's your chance to get those old questions answered.

I have to the end of August to submit my script so let's get to work on this!

I'll keep this post updated and if things fall silent, I'll bump the thread periodically with prods and musings...