Thread: Would you miss the Council if it was gone?
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2010-08-11 , 06:01
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#46
Originally Posted by silvermountain View Post
To 'back up' some of my baseless, pointless bashing
Thanks for this, there's a lot of stuff here, I'll try and address them in clumps.

a) A periodical (monthly?) announcement/post of what issues are on the table at this time - AND what progress has been done on issues that were on the table from the last post,[/quote]

An interesting idea.

b) A periodical (every six months?) bottom-up issue vote on what the Council should address,
Not sure that'd work, to be honest.

c) Dates and people's names assigned to the issues. No more of the 'Will work on'-status updates,
Which people? The Council?

d) A more active Council blog where it is actually mentioned HOW work is being carried out,
The Council blog is currently just over a post a month and its dealing with the important issues.

e) The Council to work to get Nokia representatives active on the forum. Maybe not as active as many members here but maybe arrange some "Ask Nokia" forum threads where questions can be asked and they answer them,
There are Nokia representatives active on the forum. Admittedly there were more in the past but they were driven away by incessant poking and prodding. They weren't marketing drones, like you'd get in an "Ask Nokia" thread. It'd be full of pointless questions which would get bog standard, marketing answers:
  • When is Flash 10 coming to Maemo?
  • Why isn't MeeGo going to be officially [and by this they mean Nokia Care, since Nokia are providing support in terms of work, resources and personnel to actually get MeeGo working on the N900] supported by Nokia?
  • ...

f) A static list showing ALL issues/tasks that are currently being worked on, that has been closed out and that are in the pipeline.
All these tasks should have a start-date, resolution date and owner associated with them,

g) Council members to be 'champions' of a set of tasks/issues and go out into the community and show what tasks they own (link it back to the big task list) - and where appropriate ASK community members for help/input, etc to get tasks resolved and/or suggestions for how to escalate it to the ears of Nokia. No one expects 5 people to know how to do everything. Ask.
A few points here, firstly there is a list on the Council homepage of the big issues facing the community.

No, it doesn't have dates alongside it, as we're supposed to be facilitators. You, the community, would need to deliver on things and - frankly - a lot of you don't. The same old crowd does the same things over and over again, and instead of actually contributing to things beyond bluster and noise on the forum, most people aren't proactively going out to help.

There's also no need for the Council to be summarising each month in the Maemo community, as the community - through MWKN - are doing that already.

I'm going to stop responding to these points and instead address the general point.

I have no qualms with the existence of the Council in general (although I am asking myself if the Maemo community will need one for another 6 months - but that's not what you're asking).

I have absolutely no concerns about this Council's performance. We say something and Nokia do jump: just look at the response to the Python issue. You may not think it affects you, but we've taken the concerns of the development community (frankly, a community much more important than the "why isn't the forum structured well" community), represented them to Nokia and Nokia (i.e. Quim Gil and Ronan Mac Laverty) are now investigating what can be done. And this is an issue which will affect users downstream as it will affect the number of applications which get into Ovi for Fremantle, Harmattan and MeeGo.

We're also working - right now - to get more information about the MeeGo conference sponsorship (and will play a part in deciding who gets the sponsorship), so that we can present a useful set of information to the community.

There seems to be a massive need for some expectation management.

Things the Council can do:
  • Represent community issues to Nokia. Examples: Python in Ovi, accessibility of MeeGo community to Maemo community, MyNokia.
  • Coordinate and focus community activities. Examples: summits/conferences, assisting with the coding competition as required.
  • Represent community priorities to the maemo.org paid contributors. Examples: testing infrastructure.
  • Organise community rewards/opportunities with Nokia. Examples: N900 device programme, summit/conference sponsorship.
  • Ask for help from the community.

Things the Council can't do:
  • Change Nokia's corporate mind if they think they have business reasons for it. Examples: MeeGo "officially supported" for N900.
  • Have much impact on non-community issues. Examples: Flash 10.
  • Actually work on everything.

These lists are incomplete, but does the inability of the Council to affect whether Flash 10 will come to Maemo (or even get a legitimate response to questions about it) negate the work done on the community issues? Can you see the difference?

Also, the fact that so far the majority of people (granted, hardly a statistical population at this point) either didn't know that there was a Council or feel that they could do without it should also say something.
See my post above, I really don't think it does; because you've got a subset of people who are limited to Talk, and perhaps Extras.
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