The N900 is reaching out beyond the maemo.org developer community, attracting smartphone/mobile computer consumers with less technical skill and knowledge than those who historically have frequented maemo.org. I believe the N900 and the success of future maemo devices will change the user profile of maemo.org significantly.

To make the transition easier I'd like to suggest a user and developer sub forum to the current N900 forum. Here is why:

1. Let’s start out with a broader view: Yesterday Nokia held a capital markets day for the financial community. In short, it was not a success because the financial community didn’t believe Nokia will succeed with its smartphone & mobile computer strategy.

If you want the details here are a couple of quotes from the Financial Times:

“Shares in the world’s largest mobile phone maker fell 2.4 per cent to close at €8.70 after investors were disappointed by Nokia’s guidance for its handset business.”

“Enhancing the attractiveness of Nokia’s smartphones is essential if the company is to raise the profitability of its handset unit, because the sophisticated devices generate a higher margin than basic handsets.”

“The profitability of Nokia’s handset business has plunged this year, in part because of its struggle to produce user-friendly smartphones, and Mr Kallasvuo outlined efforts to remedy the situation.”

“Nokia also said it would release a sophisticated smartphone based on a Linux operating system called Maemo in the second half of next year. It will be a successor device to the N900.”

Some analysts even went as far as to say that a smartphone success has not been discounted into Nokia’s share price. This means that Nokia succeeding in this area is not expected by the financial community.

2. To succeed Nokia arguably needs to speed up development, and heed and listen very closely to both the developers and to the newbies and inexperienced users who do not speak the engineering or software development language.

The latter group is the mass of the market. I believe a lot of them will not post in the Sandbox, or in the bugs threads, because it requires procedural knowledge, and even a specific language to be understood in those parts of the forum.

3. Right now, about 50% of all Talk participants on-line are on the N900 device forum. This forum is as popular as all the other taken together. With more widespread N900 success, more users will gather on maemo.org. They are likely to start out in the N900 thread. The majority are likely to be user rather than developer focused participants.

4. The maemo.org introduction describes the Maemo Community as follows:

“The Maemo Community is an open source community developing software around the Maemo platform. The Maemo community has over 22.000 registered members that contribute to more than 900 community development projects in the Maemo Garage.”

I’m wondering whether this will be accurate in a few months time? In a year’s time? Again, with the success of the maemo5 based N900 (and hopefully an even greater success with its maemo6 successor) I believe the forum will be flooded with new consumers who to a large extent may be unfamiliar with “open source” and “developing software.” They are just after the “community” aspect and some assistance to understand the device they have bought.

As a current member of maemo.org you may like or dislike this development. However, it is still likely to take place.

Take a look at what happened to XDA-developers. For those of you unfamiliar with that community, it started out as an HTC/Windows Mobile developer driven community.

To quote XDA “we realised that lots of ordinary users were also suffering from a lack of support. They started using the xda-developers forum to communicate and before long the forum was as much a user forum as it was a developer forum.”

Today the XDA-developers forum has close to 2 million members, over 255.000 active members, and somewhere around 5.000 on line at any given time. The overwhelming majority are not developers.

5. Right now on the N900 forum there are a lot of threads describing user experience. Some of these threads contain animosity, name calling such as “fan boy”, “troll”, flaming etc. I believe the maemo community is suffering culture clash at the moment. There are gems of relevant information in those threads, but I find there’s a lot of clutter to wade through as well.

Although there are a lot of neutral participants, there are some indications that there are “camps” forming, for example those who critique the N900 in various ways, and those that defend it. Another angle is that there’s a split between those who to some extent would like this forum to stay a forum of developers rather than to see it develop into a user community. My personal belief is it will be very hard to keep this a developer community.

So for the above reasons I would like to see a new sub-forum to the N900 forum. Or possibly a split into “N900 for developers” and “N900 for users.” In the user part all the ignorant newcomers, such as myself, can vent their seemingly stupid questions, and experienced maemo.org members so inclined can lend a hand, whether they are developers or just super-users.

Those of a more pure developer focus, who would rather not be irritated by newcomers who have no clue about terminal/command line etc can stay away from that forum.

Hence there will be less animosity both ways. Good for maemo.org, good for developers and good for new users.

Most of all, it will make it easier for those professionals at Nokia who want to follow the user experience, without having to read through useless and frequent "ego and flame wars," on the forum, and without having to retort to relying exclusively on customer focus groups.

So, ultimately it will be good for the N900, for ALL its stake-holders and hence for Nokia.

PS. Yes I know this should probably go under "Community." However it'll reach more members in the N900 thread. RevdKathy already tried in the Community and attracted little attention. My apologies to you for not following your thread. DS