Been there. Done that. Slightly too pissed off at being ignored as a voice in a (very small, and very quiet) crowd, rather than an elected voice of a community hundreds (or thousands, depending on how you count) strong.

The most striking which springs to mind is the suggestion from the Community Office that meego-community is the "official" channel for the Community Office and the fora just deal with "end-users". The problems this has caused with maemo.org are demonstrable and a large part of the Council's job is tying those two media together. We're beyond help - you can't change two communication media which both have benefits after so many years and with important people in both; but MeeGo could've avoided those issues entirely.

What did I get [as a reply]? Nothing. Zip. Nada. No reply at all, let alone a change in approach.

Texrat's still plugging away on forum.meego.com but, having played with the Netbook UX, my own interest is now entirely limited to how interesting the Handset UX is and whether any device running it (including the N900) better meets my needs than an M5/N900 does.

Back in 2005, so many of us were excited about the 770 and Maemo. It's evolved. It's been good. However, the branding/discussion and concepts around the next step are all MeeGo. That's fine. I understand it from Nokia's business point of view. Absolutely makes sense 100%.

However the mobile landscape is also very different to what it was five years ago. Back then there was no iPhone, let alone Android. PalmOS was a joke. Psion was dead and Symbian was uninteresting [still is ;-)]. The 770 really met our needs and desires in a way that no other device had (for me) for years.

Do I want to invest another 5 years of effort in MeeGo, starting at the ground floor? An opportunity to do things over, and do things right, was tempting - but initial efforts were met with lots of "well, we've got a plan for that" or "not sure we need it for MeeGo" or you
can't expect things to change overnight!" (Hmm, where've I heard that before?)

As Stephen put it so well, Maemo's dying but MeeGo isn't ready for most of us yet. That's frustrating. When a "council" badge seemingly means nothing, why not stand to one side and let someone else have a go? I've been involved in this community for five years, it's someone else's turn.

Of course, what BananasandPears showed was that the Handset UX may be interesting, and Quim's contradictory words about us "all running MeeGo devices within 6 months" suggest that despite no commercial support from Nokia, MeeGo on N900 may be a realistic day-to-day option. I look forward to it. I really do. Hopefully there'll be lots then to get teeth stuck into, but trying to get involved in community stuff in and of itself on meego.com? Not worth the effort. The lessons we learnt from rapid growth with the N900 coming to talk.maemo.org don't seem to be picked up, and suggestions for the "community" planning process were dismissed.

I can be ignored at home, and I can be ignored at work. Why volunteer to be ignored elsewhere too? :-/

Indeed. Absolutely. 100% agreed.

There's nothing more annoying in the world than someone coming to you and saying "I've got a great idea, all you have to do is code it." I've got a great idea for flying cars, but it seems no-one's interested in implementing it :-(