Actually, this would especially be a great thing for new users (even moreso for people who have never used IRC before), because logging in could automatically send a "/msg identify" command to freenode.net. Likewise, the UI could contain other helpful message commands so that people wouldn't have to "know" them.

Tim

It would also be a great opportunity for someone to provide an instruction/Q & A thread for forum members who are not familiar with relay chat or the network maemo.org uses.

Because of a stacked work schedule this week I pro'ly will not be able to attend... However, if any new users do, this would be a plus.

Please expect to cover less with any proposed agenda and provide real use follow-up and in any forum threads that emerge because of this new user presence.
Participation in the proposed forum thread by veterans along with some patience might increase the productivity of sessions and decrease duplicate or specious forum threads in the future. The original thread could also be culled for a WiKi entry.



... then maybe the vision qgil shares with John Lennon would begin to take shape.

I've installed this add-on and now currently on beta. Anyone is encouraged to test it: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=28924

#m.occ hasn't been used much (I'm not a fan of Twitter for news feeds) and I like the idea of a "Council" forum with threads.

It should have a sticky, explaining this is a micro-blogging forum (experiment) and is intended that council members will use it to post short updates.

Although I think the reason #m.occ hasn't been used much is not one of technology - it's the point GeneralAntilles made earlier (in the second post in this thread): it's a facilitation role. The updates will be one of:

• Read & posted at tmo
• Followed some stuff on #mer
• Talked some budgets about summit
• Spent time chasing up people about committed sprint tasks
• Spent time writing up minutes/preparing agendas
• ...

See the council members' activity reports on the sprint pages for examples; sometimes there are committed tasks which are being commented on but the communication method for that is already being discussed on -community (oooh, look some meta-facilitation).

The big "problem" is it's not clear when a council member is acting on behalf of the council, and when they're acting as an involved community member. It's not a problem (IMHO) because there's no difference! As a council member, I'm continuing to do what I did before - only moreso. This is why there's no "briefing guide" or "member activity log": you're elected because of who you are and your participation within (parts of) the community, not on any specific platform (as Quim has pointed out, the day-to-day power of the council is negligible).

My view of the chair role is that takes a significant chunk of time to chair the sprint meeting, make the necessary secretarial changes in the wiki, put in the skeleton of the tasks and then chase people up for updates. This is a problem we've recognised, but I'm not sure that any solution (although excellent overall) won't just shift the distribution of work within the role. But that's fine - I signed up to be the secretary (it's just that "chair" sounded grander when I was drafting the original constitution almost exactly a year ago).

Although you are right that not everyone on the council has to be following everything - I think it's important if at least one or two members are. The facilitation role: communicating things which are going on in one corner of the Maemo community to the other corners is the single most important role (again, IMHO). This is what makes a "central council communication channel" such an odd idea - it's the exact opposite of what the council is for!

For example, taking the discussion on drivers from the wiki discussion page and repeatedly posting it in the right threads here. Pointing out duplicate bug reports and the right bug reports to rally around for a particular issue. And so on and so on.

Again, it's difficult to quantify - how much comes from being an active community member, and how much from a council member? You just do more of whatever it was you were doing before, with a slight administrative overhead of the sprint meetings (wherever possible). An increase of about 4h a week on average sounds about right. Say 16h a month, or 24h a month for chair.

I won't mention the rate at which my employer charges me out to clients (on an 8h man day). The 16 man days over a 6 month tour (excluding the work I do "for free" as a community member) would be a very nice lump sum (even after tax ;-))

Finally, some other randomness:

It says "maemo.org account". My reading of the rules (is the chair authoritative on this? Am I authoritative enough to say I am? ;-)) is that this would now include talk.maemo.org accounts. However, it is still dependent on users with such accounts having maemo.org accounts in order to calculate the karma? Although, one could(/should) argue that the karma for a tmo account could be simply calculated without having a maemo.org account (whatever the post count & thanks works out to be to get a score of 10)

As GeneralAntilles has pointed out, no-one is making such a proposal - nor is it technically feasible (the #maemo channel on Freenode exists because people are there - there's zero ownership and so no-one (apart from Freenode) could discontinue it).

However, is your question:

No, of course not; for two reasons:

1. I would hope that leadership would mean being influenced, but not tied to forum polls which have - over the last 3.5 years - been shown to be entirely useless for anything remotely meaningful on ITT :-)
2. the members of the existing IRC community have more say over their future than anyone else.

In exactly the same way as if the question were phrased "if there was a poll on maemo-community and tmo about whether to shut down tmo/make drastic changes; would the weight of the forum poll results and the email vote results be weighted equally," the answer is still no. For the same reasons.

Now, you could try arguing that the theme changes fell into exactly this category. Except the council did its role: once Reggie announced that he was moving his site under the maemo.org umbrella, the council kept all the different portions of the community aware of the discussions about the look & feel for the whole of maemo.org; where they were happening and how to contribute.

Not to try and turn this thread into yet-another-can-we-have-a-dark-theme-oh-look-we've-got-one-yay!-fest; but yes, there were issues with the go live which pissed off a vocal portion of this forum's membership. Yes, the council could have said:

But we didn't. So what? No-one else said it either until afterwards (exactly the same as with the voting in the elections, FWIW).

We're facilitators. We're not super-heroes (despite the costumes being designed!).

I meant one forum thread e.g. "Community Council Microblog" where only the council members would post (if all you are moderators I guess this is feasible). People having concerns or wiling to comment can start a new thread, quote the original post and go on.

An own subforum would be worth only if the activity of the Council was so intense that several threads would be going on at the same time, creating a lot of noise in the maemo.org forum. Just the same as it's been requested to the Alternatives.

Ah, that's even better then.

Indeed. And, as facilitators, I don't believe we should be making that much noise about what we are doing - just what everyone else is.

Update:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...ay/002504.html

You can also add comments/suggestions here, but I'd rather they go to the list.

Thanks,
Tim

(Still working on a meeting time that works for everyone.)

Tim, this is AWESOME....

But I think it deserves its own thread and some visibility??

Ok. As soon as I can get everyone to agree to a date/time, I'll do that -- with plenty of time for comments too.

Tim