Let me explain a few things here that might be able to help sort this out for you hopefully.

The forum is not a complete time-waster. I can understand your frustration (of which, I'm sure I'm a part of) but it's really not that bad.

As you can see, the forum is a good place to get a wide variety of opinions from the community. You get a mix of Nokians, 3rd party developers and end users. It's hard to use for organizational stuff though. Then there's also the issue that different people in the community are in different places. Some of us are present all over. Some are only on the mailing lists... some only on IRC, some only on their own forums, and so on. That's human nature, not much you can do about that.

One thing we do have which has been a lot more successful for organization is the Maemo Wiki. Projects such as Mer and the community council use it very successfully for their goals and I think that it can serve that same purpose for portrait mode users as well.

Let me give you (everyone interested in portrait mode, that is) a few good ideas for how to get yourselves organized using the Wiki.

- Set up a Wiki page and send out an open call to everyone that wants portrait mode to come and contribute.
- Find someone that's passionate about your goal to lead (regardless of technical ability)
- Clearly state the project's full goals on the Wiki page.
- Create a list of people willing to devote some time to the project, separate them by their competences.
- Take a look at the goals and see how they can be split up into several tasks, or smaller doable chunks.
- Assign different tasks to different people keeping in mind task dependencies (It's hard to start on task C when it requires task A to be done first)
- Organize a way to have everyone working on the project to meet at the same time perhaps once a month so that everyone involved can see how the project is evolving as a whole.
- Above all else, don't get discouraged.

I know that the Maemo way of doing things is very different than what users are used to in the Symbian world. Stay invovled, push for what you want and get others to get involved. Once the momentum starts picking up, it'll be impossible to stop.

Rotation support in previous Maemo versions were completely community-based and there's no reason why that can't work again.

Feel free to ask those who are spearheading their own desires for help, advice and anything else - myself and the rest of us old coots included.