So easy to armchair quarterback. To call names. To lay blame. To ignore effort and accomplishment.

So much more difficult to work one's *** off in such an apparently thankless position.

You think you're disappointed when council efforts come to nothing, silvermountain? Try putting in the hours I have. Try putting together a community outreach program and, just as you gain momentum after hours and hours and hours of design, review and discussion, the very reason for it disappears. Try writing and maintaining a blog partially dedicated to the community and having to stay on top of it to delete the juvenile nastygrams left by anonymous cowards. Try countless emails about community issues to various executives with no replies.

Try bending over backwards for myriad members of a community, some of whom leave petty, churlish posts like yours here as a "reward" for the effort.

As a community leader, council member or otherwise, I have gone to bat for this place and its people-- including you in all your nasty ingratitude. I was the one staying after work to dig through spare N800 parts, slicing my fingers on faceplates in the process, and mailing them out free to anyone who asked. I was the one who put my job at risk, angering people like Quim by challenging the tablet program to do better by the community. I'm the one enduring all the grief that malcontents like you dish out at a distance, in such cowardly fashion, because I'm stupid enough to care about people I'll never meet.

And that goes for every council member who's ever served.

Unstructured? Maybe to the anal retentive. Incompetent? An ironic assessment. Powerless and ineffective? Sure, at times. But only a complete idiot would confuse Nokia's monolithic resistance to change with the fault of five community people who care enough to devote their free time to that "futility".

What have YOU done?

Unbelieveable.