OK, change "organised" to "cohesive", or scratch it altogether.

And Quim's original post wasn't inviting the community to get involved in Fremantle/Harmattan development. It wasn't saying that Nokia thinks the community aren't doing enough to develop Diablo/Fremantle/Harmattan.

It was saying that we've got a lot of people who sit around and talk (myself included), and that that effort would be more productive to the good of the community itself if it was sustained effort in the direction of a couple of products that could do with dedicated beta testers, people for the author to discuss direction with, bug triagers etc.

Every single product in downloads.maemo.org has its own mini-community. I think Quim's point could be summed up that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. However, that at the moment, the individual communities around a product (whether it's mediautils, mud-builder, Canola, ...) are - in general - not strong enough. And that if people took more time to be engaged in these sub-communities, the overall community; and the vitality of the platform would be much improved.

Of course I can, although it will lead us even farther from the main topic:

• iPhone - no official "community" to speak of, due to severely restricted, paid app distribution system and other restrictions.
• Blackberry - no real community to speak of although Java based SDK is available.
• Symbian - some forums and at least one quasi-community website (newlc.com), but forums mostly contain questions from frustrated commercial developers, not answers.
• WinMobile - lots of people, mostly doing commercial programming and sometimes exchanging hints
• Pandora - finally, some community there, just no hardware to develop on.

So, which of these are any "better" than Maemo community and in what way?

Scroll back to my post about sources of motivation. Indirectly, it suggests things that may make things better. In addition to that post, I would like to note that there is clearly three groups of people in the Maemo community:

• Users
• Application developers
• System level developers

Now, these three groups produce different things and have different expectations. The current situation of not having active support for the current Maemo (Diablo) mainly hurts the users (whose bug reports are not addressed properly and timely) and system developers (who are left to work on the system that has already been marked for retirement).

To make community more cohesive and productive, these two problems have to be addressed.

I'm starting to wish I had kept my mouth shut. That's looking like a really good idea...

I would have thought that this thread was more about application developers and users contributiong to their development. Not so much about system level development and users filing bugs against system components.


In fact, as a user who does file bugs against system components (or contributes information because I'm affected) I feel I'm very well treated recently. I get all the information I need. Many of the bugs I'm following right now are already fixed and a new binary will be provided in an upcoming SSU. In other cases, I get in-depth information about why things don't work out the way I want. Recently I even found a fixed version of an application I had problems with right there in bugzilla, as an attachment, before the SSU came out. From my personal POV, that's good. Not great, not over-the-top-exceptional-let's dance, but solid and good.
Just to set things in proportion: There were five software upgrades for the N800 in 2008, all of which fixed bugs I personally had encountered, some of which introduced new features.
For my S60 phone, I got exactly one software update in 2008, which fixed nothing and introduced not one single new feature. There are dozens of well-known bugs in this phone's software, but no place to file them. There's no development whatsoever going on on Nokias side, no support, nothing - even though the user base is much larger and it would really, really pay off in terms of customer satisfaction to fix a bug or two.
Comparing my S60-experience to my Maemo-experience, it's like a completely different company. Let's not forget what we have, how good it really is.

It's different with applications. I find it difficult to find the correct place to suggest improvements or report errors with non-Nokia applications... Sometimes all I have is an email address or a forum nick and I'm not sure if these developers want to accept my input at all.

So one thing to be considered to help community development (always defining "community" as application developers and users' interaction with them) is to really encourage user feedback. (Bugzilla/Extras would be the place for it.) Also, as stated before in this thread, users should really go and actively search for the appropriate feedback channel for the application they recently fell in love with. Don't just tell the author that the icon is missing - also tell him that you spent some time looking for this feedback channel. Afterwards, suggest it would be cool if he hosted his project somewhere (garage?) in a way that allows access to the sources.

I admit I'm too lazy with this. I accept poor quality software and don't react as long as I'm not invited to. Bugzilla I see as a friendly invitation. If the software doesn't even contain an "about" with a real name and a working email address, I don't think my feedback is welcome. I'll change that. I'll try to get on people's nerves even though they obviously try to avoid just that.

I promise.

This is the frustration I've been having. There's just enough that's non-standard or broken on the maemo platform that simply porting applications constantly is more difficult than it needs to be. To address your specific example, I've been trying to find some way to use the built-in camera for ages, but I'm constantly being stymied by things like:

• The tablet randomly crashes or reboots when taking full-resolution photos
• Audio and video can only be recorded together if you use the Nokia-supplied GStreamer plugins, but the A/V never stays in sync, no matter what resolution you use.
• The kernel driver for the camera throws random I/O errors, corrupting the video stream. This might be the cause for any or all of the above problems.
• The camera cannot be used as a V4L1 device, ruling out a vast majority of existing Linux software
• Audio support is also quite non-standard, especially audio input.

In my time with the tablet, I've seen this kind of problem encountered many times. The community gets all excited about a new application for the tablet, everyone starts pitching in, then a big, nasty problem comes up and interest just kind of fizzles away, because it requires a lot of work to workaround these kind of problems, and it is often just too much for the return on investment.

Very good reading:

building a community around your F/OSS project
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/b...your-foss.html

That is a very good article.

And now, thanks to qgil and asiego, I now know the secret of getting new people involved in a project:

I really liked this quote:

Drat. And to think I was never aware of being THAT successful all these years !
Thanks for the heads up qole... :-)

Finding a new home from here.