It's been six months which have flown by, but the current Maemo Community Council's term is coming to an end and it's time for the election of five people to the council who represent the Maemo community's interests to Nokia and vice-versa.

The next election's voting will run from Thursday, 16th September to Wednesday, 22nd September.

What's it for?

The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community. It acts as a focal point for the Maemo community, representing developers on, and users of, maemo.org to Nokia (and vice versa). Examples of council activity can be found on the Council homepage or in the blog, but also in the tens of little things that happen in the background of which you may be unaware.

For example, in this term, some of the issues the Council dealt with include:

• Cease & desist issues over Chromium distribution
• The release of PR1.2
• The bundling of Nokia's "MyNokia" service with PR1.2
• The pushing of Ovi Store for Maemo, but the limited set of technologies it supports
• The Fremantle Developer Device Queue
• Improvements to the Extras-testing process
• The evolution of MeeGo
• The MeeGo Conference (replacing the annual Maemo Summit)
• The announcement that Nokia will not be supplying a commercial-quality MeeGo variant to N900 end-users
• Implementing a set of rules for talk.maemo.org
• A brainstorm on the future of the Maemo community
• The increasing move of focus of Nokia from Maemo maintenance and support to MeeGo growth.

What's next?

Community members should be considering whether they want to stand. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information.

The election timescale (all times UTC) is:

Voting closes:
23:59, Wednesday, 22nd September 2010 Voting opens:
00:00, Thursday, 16th September 2010 Hust ings Nominations close:
23:59, Wednesday, 8th September 2010 Nominations open:
00:00, Thursday, 26th August 2010 How's it work?

The election is a "single transferrable vote". Each member of maemo.org, who has had an account for over 3 months and earned over 10 "karma" points, gets a ballot. They rank their candidates in order of preference; if their top candidate cannot get elected with the votes they receive, the votes are redistributed until all five seats have been allocated.

Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia.



Link: Original article.