There are more and more requests from all corners willing to know about maemo.org members in country X. I believe this feature would be useful for many people.

Where do you live? Am I near to you? How many maemo.org mates in my city? Should we meet some time?

The basic way would be to introduce Country / Region / City. If OMWeather can do it why maemo.org not.

Another option would be to us knwon location data. People like bergie has many ideas.

Integrating this with the possibility of seeing listings would be really cool to put this community on the map.

PS: now I realize that this was better for a brainstorm. Let's see what do you think and I'll create the entry there if it's interesting.

Absolutely. But what form would that take? Personally I'd like to enter coordinates...

Coordinates of what? the city/town you are in? or the coordinates of your exact adress? if option 2, then i find it just silly... and no offense mate, but i think if we had names instead of numbers, most of the people will find it useful and indentify with them more than with just some coordinates they would have to insert in google maps. This aint LOST lol.

I agree Jack, and the coarse/fine adjustment could be up to debate. It was only a suggestion after all. Maybe both X,Y and city name (et al) could be used.

Country name can be grabbed from GeoIP. While not 100% accurate its generally correct.

• Coordinates are useful for those little farmer villages you never heard of.
  
• Map is useful to visualize but doesn't scale by default (needs zoom; see Google Earth) and costs more data than text.
  
• City name works but requires typing. Javascript can help completion, or lists to choose from. Ie. Country -> (State ->) Province / County -> City -> Neighborhood -> ... [Country can use GeoIP to select default option asking user to confirm]
  
• Location_name to coordinates converter probably exist.

GPS can be used too. Or location API from Maemo or Fennec. But by now it is almost becoming a map application. Maybe embed Ovi Maps. LOL. Actually, not an entirely stupid idea. Google does that too...

An option to add the languages one speaks (and allow preferred language, and allow a simple gradation to specify how well) is useful. This helps us understand and empathize with (new) users' communication skills, or allow for more personal help in native language. These not always correlate to the country one lives in. Case in point: qgil. Default suggestion can be primary language in country however some countries have multiple languages or have dialects not widely recognized adding possibility of insulting culture. Usually is same as country but the world is international/globalized these days...

[EDIT: @ Jack, if user knows their exact coordinates and this is converted to Country/../../.. then that is much faster than typing these out or selecting these on map (assume one has to zoom too). I'd say it is safe to assume most people do not know these coordinates.[/EDIT]

all this would take is a maemo.org widget. whos working on it guys?

Postal codes should be fine... You really don't want to get to detailed but It is a great idea, btw.

A motorcycle brand that I have owned for many years now has an owners club that publishes an annual membership directory. The "Book" comes in handy while touring the countryside. I don't leave home with out it on any extended ride and have met many people from it through out the years.
Physical addresses were never used but telephone numbers and now email addresses sorted by Country, State/Province, City/Postal code are enough to initiate first meets at a local Pub or wherever.

The location of where I live, or the location of where I work? What about when travelling on work to a far off city? A single field isn't enough.

For example, the only other Maemo user near home is my wife (and son), AFAIK. In London, we've got lots of people (crashanddie, qwerty12, anidel, etc.). In Sweden, there's Jeremiah - but Gothenberg's not that close to Stockholm (AFAIK).

In my ideal world, I could ...

• ... enter my home address in whatever granularity i like (input fields are available from country to latitude/longitude).
• ... add profile@maemo.org to my jabber roster if my XMPP setup allows location sharing. this way i could also publish where i'm right now. (the profile would read: home: vienna, austria; right now in: amsterdam, netherlands)

also, this information would be used in the tmo profile (and header) if the 2 profiles are linked.

Oh, and if there's lots of Midgard work to do to do this well, I'd suggest a big SSO push, fixing the "forgot you're logged in" and a lot of other little user-facing papercuts takes priority :-)