Congratulations to the new Council - and thank you to everybody running for election and voting.

Looking forward for the next steps.

Happy new half year, CM's! looking forward to what can be the last halft year of talk.maemo.org

Any chance to add som specific avatar for CM or some or other colour of the name maybe?

qgil, could You meet me @ #maemo? It seems you've private messages disabled on TMO.

/Estel

I disabled PMs long ago because many users thought I was some kind of Nokia Care proxy.

webchat.freenode.net doesn't work right now (from my desk at work)? Anyway, there is this thread, the mailing list, and even my email address.

That's Group Contact , afaik x-fade. Chanops can't do much.

/j

Well, if that's the true size of the community so be it. In fact from a certain point of view the size of the community can be defined by the election turnout. Anyway, let me put it like this: I will find it very depressing if we see significantly more community "members" apply for the Nokia device handout than voted.

I'll consider that an evidence for poorly prepared and advertised elections. If we'd define any national state community by the number of actively participating voters... well, go figure. An immanent property of a democratic system is your right to NOT vote if you don't feel like doing so. And to no democratically elected entity it ever occurred to define all the non-voters as not belonging to the community they plan to represent - au contraire. "you had the option to vote, now you got what you asked for - even if you opted for not voting at all" seems the worldwide mantra of democratic elections, defining the "community" as all those who had the right and opportunity to vote, not as those 20%..50% that actually did it.

/j

In fact you do not have a right not to vote in democracy as created by the ancient Greeks. According to them not caring caused you to lose your civil rights.

A fun trivia is that the word idiot (Ιδιώτης - private party) means the person that does not care to take part in public affairs and was an insult in ancient Greece. Now in Modern Greek it is no longer insulting, but the insulting meaning found it's way through Latin into English.

Aside from the history trivia though I agree that in a community like m.org you have every right not to vote.

Well, it's not "just" history. Both the countries where I live allow it's citizens to not vote. But in Belgium, for instance, you'll end up being fined.

I wouldn't define it that way. I think the best definition is the amount of maemo software development that goes on here, which is less than half of what it was two years ago.