So if I understand correctly this should answer the original topic:

The council is useless in terms of bringing messages and complaints to Nokia because Nokia don't care, but on the other hand are useful for the community in terms of operation and management.

Is that it? I think this question was originally raised in terms of the council influencing Nokia's decisions.

To the OP. Don't underestimate air. Even though you don't see anything, it's keeping you going. So even if the council by no fault of their own can do nothing to influence Nokia, don't think that they're not needed.

To the council: Some proof of your various tasks might clear some doubts.

To Nokia: Piss off.

To anyone thinking they can do the council's job better and influence Nokia: Please do.

About the Council: I even didn't know about its existence.
Considering the way Nokia behaved about N900 (months to have pr 1.2, no voice maps, no flash 10.1, no meego upgrade for n900, no this, no that, no up, no down, no here, no there), the council didn't have too much success in its interaction with Nokia. Maybe if the Council were not existing, things would even be worse, maybe not: who knows?

That sounds a bit like shrouding the role and the job in a fog.
I am sure facilitation has tangible results - in that whatever is facilitated ultimately comes to fruition.

And no I am not in the camp to raise issues about you guys and make a silly issue of it but asking to see results is my role as a community member I believe.

First it was attack Nokia - understandable, and now it's attack the Council - unbelievable.

I'd like to see the OP provide proof of what he has accomplished compared to what the Council has.

I think Texrat has been slightly overstating our lack of results as part of his defence (quite rightly) about whether we've been doing anything and/or are incompetent (rather than impotent).

I've already mentioned the Ovi/Python letter, which has set wheels in motion and is the true original point of the council - representing real community issues (rather than consumer issues).

Other concrete effects we've had in the past few weeks or will have in the forthcoming weeks:

• Managing the N900 device queue so that developers are getting them, and reminding Quim that it exists.
• Helping in the Coding Competition, as required (see above).
• Representing the Maemo community on the committee deciding who'll get travel & accomodation sponsored to the conference in November.
• Officially raising the MyNokia issue and getting an official response (even if no-one liked what it said)

Those are just OTTOMH. So yes, I agree, if all we did was poke Nokia and got nothing but silence there is no need for the council. But in the actions above there have been concrete results which, without a body representing the community (which is oh so much wider than people who just talk on Talk), would've been much harder to achieve; if at all.

See above. Nokia are not stonewalling the community efforts. Nokia is not responding to incessant rants about Flash 10 or MeeGo being supported as an end-user operating system. They are not the same thing! :-)

Such efforts and results are all communicated on the Council blog which is syndicated to the Community forum on Talk. Very kindly, MWKN always covers them as well; but that's not affiliated with the council (*cough*).

Previously there had been complaints about having a single place. We have that. Then there were complaints about visibility (despite it being syndicated to maemo.org/news/ and Planet), so it's now syndicated to the Community forum.

If people want further communication, I will be happy to drive round to their house and sing what we've been doing. I'll charge travel + £500 for each thing, but you will know what we've been doing :-)

Easy way to settle this

Just put the council on hold for a few months - stop all activity tomorrow - the members can reclaim their free time and their lives back and put that time to more fun and productive uses rather then be a punching bag between the community hammer and the Nokia wall.

If the council actually does anything relevant to the community rather then producing useless beaucratic reports that nobody reads, then something will break. Things can then resume when you get "Please come back !" community threads posted here.

If the council does not actually do anything relevant to the community, then no one will notice and you can just disband the council permanently and give ppl some of their free time back - life is short so why waste it on something nobody gives a frig about ?

No this is not sacarsm, just do it and settle this issue definitively once and for all rather then have another 100 page thread and causes ill feeling and useless circular mental masturbatory posts.

Well, not to be too rude, the "who knows?" question is easy to answer: "those who know more than you".

Please read my post above, including the bit about expectation management. None of the things you list are community issues, they are consumer issues - and that's the difference. Yes, we've represented consumer issues as well (MyNokia recently, USB ports in the past, official MeeGo support); but the expectation of success there is very different to us organising who gets their trip to the November conference sponsored, for example.

I'm pretty much done with the justification side of this because the loud, angry few who insist the council is useless will never be convinced otherwise. That's obvious from the persistence in denial despite clear examples of council engagement and success. Their minds were made up long ago.

But the "I didn't even know the council existed" is a different issue.

It's right there with "No one publishes any news" or any of the other myriad similar complaints. I'm not saying this one is outright invalid but I would like to hear ideas on what else could be done to improve visibility.

I'm of the mind that it mostly boils down to people ignoring the Community section. Ironic and troubling...

abill_uk, I wanna meet you in person, and get you up to speed on Logic 101. It will open your eyes.

[sorry for offtopic, but i have bad custom to write little and then it explodes as here]

Btw. I think my first grievances here were that this place looks like mess. I mean that people really have to spend months here before they understand:

- Garage
- Brainstorm
- Bugzilla
- Wiki
- Packages
- - testig
- - devel
- Council
- planet maemo
- Community / devel sections
- Countless links that end up on page that might be updated two years ago
- Gtk, QT and endless amount of different little keyword that tell you nothing, of course you can google, but one page that collects important terms and describes them with one sentence would be good (heyy job for me )

Also almost complete lack of "marketing skills" to get people seeing stuff, getting excited about stuff and maybe perhaps then collaborating and helping. Yes i know that everyone is free to do whatever they want, but IMO marketing your own freewill and stuff what is going on puts things easily on positive cycle. I hope that people who have studied some marketing understand what i´m here talking about. For example changing news banner (Yes you nerds there backseats...getting nervous about terrible ads and stuff but probably you can filter these kind of stuff with your amazing skills) in T.M.O that reports on going projects and apps that need votes etc. weekly startups with "banners"/text advertisements with text lilke "Wanna help with icon beautification please see this link", "graph designers needed", "Wiki project going on here", "Countdown to Bug hunting day, Get your N900s ready, still 14 days", "Today testing mayhem in irc #N900","Brainstorm sessions on #N900".

All this on maemo.org, twitter, facebook, rss feeds etc. to make this kinds of announcements and I would be really surprised that if people do not get involved more and be more aware what is happening here.

Well said!

Every owner of N900 is not automagically the member of Maemo Community.



IMO even not every TMO and/or maemo.org account holder is automagically a Maemo Community member. I believe that you need to put something to the community pool first, to be in a position of a member.