The election of the fourth Maemo Community Council has concluded, and the results announced. As chair of the new council, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves:


Ryan Abel (GeneralAntilles) "I've been involved with Maemo in one way or another since the earliest days of the 770, I love this platform, I love this community, and I'd like to help make it the best it can be." Ryan has been on the council twice before: as chair in the inaugral council, and as an active member during the second.


Randall Arnold (Texrat) "I was originally involved with the Maemo devices as a Nokia factory QA engineer and in 2009 transitioned into more of a community-support role when my Nokia position was eliminated." Randall is continuing on the council after being elected to the third council.


Attila Csipa (achipa/attila77) "I'm a software consultant specializing in OSS technologies by day and Open Source hacker/language geek by night. I joined the Maemo community ranks in 2008 when I (almost by chance) acquired a N810, and was almost instantly taken by the possibilities, both of the Maemo devices themselves and the already formed community around them." After a long time in the community, and being very active in the support of Python and Qt in Maemo, Attila is elected to the council for the first time.


Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) - chair "I'm a software architect and developer in my day job, and bought a 770 the day they went on sale. Having moved up through each generation, I've tried to be active and involved in all aspects of the Maemo community. As well as a community member, I've been "scratching my itches" with projects such as tablet-encode, Hermes, Catorise and now MWKN (Maemo Weekly News)." Andrew, like Ryan, was a member of the inaugral council, and chaired the second.


Javier S. Pedro (javispedro) "Computer engineering student in Barcelona, Spain; and the owner of N900 and N810. I've been the developer of some game ports with some system stuff; this year I've finally experienced the stress of having thousands of feature requests (and TODO items) and not knowing where to start :)". Javier is the newest community member on the council, and brings a fresh perspective. This term is going to see many changes, following the announcement from Nokia and Intel of Moblin and Maemo merging to form MeeGo. Exactly what this transition will involve remains to be seen, but hopefully we'll be able to help steer our community through to a stronger place.

We've already been hard at work: selecting a chair (me); revamped the council homepage (further suggestions welcome) and set up a link between the council blog and the Community forum at Talk. In particular, the new homepage features a "hot topics" table listing the biggest and widest spanning issues facing the community at the moment, and a particular point of contact for them.

We're your council, so please get in touch via email (council@maemo.org); IRC; mailing lists or Talk. Please remember, though, that the council doesn't (and shouldn't!) do everything. If you want to step up to organise something and want our support, we'll be happy to give it!



Link: Original article.

Yay, it worked :-)

Unfortunately, I realised the "I'd like to take this opportunity..." won't work very well when it shows up here with the new CommunityCouncil user :-)

Apologies to any artists who dislike my hacked together avatar for the account!

I guess the author needs to sign his name at the bottom.

So that's an account we can all use? Sweetness. I'm thinking it could use a signature too.

Building on what Jaffa said... I tried to fill way too many gaps last term by focusing on details. This term I'm taking it up a level or two and looking for help. A good example of how this can work was AndrewFBlack stepping up to work on community outreach. There will be many such opportunities going forward and the five of us can only be spread so thin! So by all means, if you see that you fit an initiative we're championing don't be shy; jump in!

And thanks, Jaffa.

Is there any chance this "bridge" could easily map the post author to this board' username?

If the idea requires any coding, just scrap it: signature to posts will be fine

(Reasoning: I don't like "big brother"-like fictional entities acting as users; I didn't like them either when b.m.o operated this way -- "Maemo QA").

The bridge is actually just from the Council Blog to the Community Forum. The RSS feed of the blog gets checked every 10 minutes and a new thread in the Community forum gets automatically created by the 'CommunityCouncil' bot member.

The feature is built into vBulletin so no extra coding was done.

Is the council chair the only one who will be speaking from this account?

No. As I said when I pitched the idea, and Reggie says above, this is linked to the RSS feed for the council blog. To which all the council can post.

I don't have the password, nor any desire to know it, for the "CommunityCouncil" account. I would expect that no-one would ever log in to it, nor post from it directly. All it will ever do is post new threads in the community forum when a new post appears in the council blog.

ok, I understood the feed part... sorry for not being clear, I was asking about regular posting. But I got my answer.

Jaffa, is that your wedding or corporate picture?

Nice speech.