That's a mechanism for communication, so did you believe the right things were communicated, just not in the most visible way? (I don't remember Reggie replying whether or not it was doable; however, if it is, it's a mechanism which I hope would be used carefully and with consideration in future. But we should be careful of its overuse.)

For example, in the circumstance we're discussing, Reggie himself announced it on the frontpage of internettablettalk.com, which resulted in a thread in the forums (the exact sections of which I'm not sure of, since it pre-dates the great reshuffle).

OK, so it wasn't prominently showed on people's next visit, but it was hardly hidden in the basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard".

As you'll have seen, this has now taken effect, with all decisions being primarily discussed in talk. Of course, now it makes them easy to get lost in the noise, but the diligent set of moderators try to sticky those which are though to be important. And other efforts, like my own Maemo Weekly News, try to distill the news. But slamming up an interstitial for everything "that can affect the community" wouldn't work - it'd become too frequent. So even with that tool at our disposal in future, it'd require someone to evaluate everything and then decide if it was appropriate. That's a lot of points for people missing things and still you'd end up with some people thinking the tool was being overused, and others thinking it was underused.

Out of the 11 people who have been on the council, 9 either started in the forums or have been very active here over the entire course of their involvement. The implication that the "community members who were primarily involved in the forum" were somehow ignored, forgotten about or purposely sidelined is particularly grating. Some of us have gone to great lengths, and great effort, to ensure that - in the last election in particular - everyone on the forum who was eligible to vote on their forum activity alone received explicit instructions on how to ensure they were eligible to vote, and why it was important.

303 people voted in the last election. The theory that there is a vast pool of enfranchised people on the fora, waiting for the opportunity to make their voice heard doesn't seem to be reality. Getting involvement or traction on any particular topic proves difficult, whether it's bug days; testing marathons; community outreach or input on what colour to paint the bikeshed - and this isn't just on talk.maemo.org.

I argue that real end-users don't regularly (or, in the vast majority of cases, ever) post to Internet forums. What we have here, and elsewhere on maemo.org, are enthusiasts and power-users.

I don't disagree!

<sigh />

I said trying to count the exact number of people in the Maemo community was somewhat wasted effort. You can get some headline numbers, but even if you ignore the talk.maemo.org accounts which have been disabled (i.e. because they're spammers) - which is about half - you still have long dormant accounts. But what do some big numbers tell you? Is Mike Cane still a part of the Maemo community, for example (his talk account is active and he's eligible to vote in the election if he wanted to)?

What about bloggers? What about people who post at Forum Nokia; or other forums? What about someone who develops software for internal use at their company, and never uploads it to Extras? Hell, before we had the push on third party repositories, you couldn't even really tell how many people were pushing out packages for Maemo!

Let's do a thought experiment. We have a consumer, Bob, who's just bought an N900 after some pretty adverts he saw all over the printed media in London. At what point does he become "part" of the Maemo community:

1. He reads the manual.
2. He tweets that it's really cool, and reads some tweets from others about them.
3. He googles "N900" and reads a blog or two about what other people are doing with it.
4. He goes to Ovi Store and downloads Angry Birds.
5. He goes to Maemo Select and downloads ATI85.
6. He goes to maemo.org/downloads/ and installs OMWeather.
7. He goes back to maemo.org/downloads/ and installs a few other things.
8. He wonders where portrait mode/voice-navigation/MMS is, and finds talk.maemo.org. He signs up for an account and posts a message asking how to turn it on.
9. After getting his answer, he wanders off for a while whilst still using his N900 every day.
10. He installs some more software from maemo.org/downloads/ and decides to rate it, so signs up for a maemo.org account to leave a comment for the developer.
11. He starts rating more software as he uses it.
12. He occasionally looks at talk.maemo.org's front page to see if there are any interesting "Active Topics"
13. He sees a topic which is asking a question to which he knows the answer and posts a reply.
14. ...

I'm bored now - but I hope you see my point: there are a lot of stages between "getting account", "creating first thread", "rating first download", "creating second thread", "posting first reply" in which someone could become engaged and part of the community. Until Bob's tenth post and until he's checking talk.maemo.org at least once a week, I'd say Bob wouldn't consider himself "part of the community" and that's what the definition of the community really is: if you think you're part of it, you are. And that's why it's difficult to count.