... well, firstly, nobody has ever said "welcome" to me ... at least not that I'm aware of ... and that may well be my fault for not posting in the newbie thread (I'm bad, I've never once posted in a newbie thread!) but it doesn't hurt for people to acknowledge people with low post numbers out there in the regular bits of the forum ...

... secondly it's blooming scary trying to get involved in brainstorming, bugzilla, voting for suggestions, testing etc ... maybe I just haven't found the messages explaining any of them yet, but I really have no idea how to contribute to those without making a complete hash of it all ... are you trying to get people involved and am I just missing it all? Or is it just too stupidly hard to expect newbies to get involved?

... and thirdly at least when the n900 was first released, there was an assumption of knowledge that made a lot of posts by those trying to be really helpful completely useless for me coming from a numpty level of maemo style knowledge ... again, I should probably have made it clearer that I needed more complete instructions, but that assumption of knowledge made it hard for me to feel like anything but a complete fool with a phone that I was/am never going to understand ...

I don't think it's really a question of literally welcoming newbies (although that certainly doesn't hurt!) ... for me it's more a kind of bridging that's needed to ease me and other newbies into becoming a productive member of the community ... maybe it's just me missing it, maybe none of the other newbies care, but since you're after more productive community members to ease the burden of inane newbie questions maybe it is something that you want to address ...